A lock-free, cache-efficient shared ring buffer for multi-core architectures

Abstract

We propose MCRingBuffer, a lock-free, cache-efficient shared ring buffer that provides fast data accesses among threads running in multi-core architectures. MCRingBuffer seeks to reduce the cost of inter-core communication by allowing concurrent lock-free data accesses and improving the cache locality of accessing control variables used for thread synchronization. Evaluation on an Intel Xeon multi-core machine shows that MCRingBuffer achieves a throughput gain of up to 4.9x over existing concurrent lock-free ring buffers. A motivating application of MCRingBuffer is parallel network traffic monitoring, in which MCRingBuffer facilitates multi-core architectures to process packets at line rate.