Lockless programming

In the world of multi-core programming, traditional parallel programming techniques with locks (mutexes and similar mechanisms) create performance bottlenecks. Lockless programming is a set of techniques employing atomic operations to synchronize data exchange between threads. The talk introduces the audience to the lockless programming, presents its benefits and pitfalls. The presenter will talk about support for atomic operations in different CPU families as well as support for them in lower- and higher-level languages. He will also cover reordering and memory barriers. He will end the talk with tips on designing lockless algorithms and practical examples of lockless data structures.