Presents a solution to races and deadlocks based on a well-known deadlock-avoidance protocol and shows how it can be enforced by the compiler. It can be applied to programs in which the number of locks is fixed and known up front.

Writing lock-free code can confound anyone-even expert programmers, as Herb shows in this article.

Interprocess communication is an essential component of modern software engineering. Often, lock-free IPC is accomplished via special processor commands. This article propose a communication type that requires only atomic writing of processor word fro...

Explains why in the concurrent world, locality is a first-order issue that trumps most other performance considerations. Now locality is no longer just about fitting well into cache and RAM, but to avoid scalability busters by keeping tightly coupled ...

Shows different ways of how to write a fast, internally synchronized queue, one that callers can use without any explicit external locking or other synchronization, and compares the performance.

Explores effective uses of threads by looking at a multi-threaded implementation of the QuickSort algorithm and reports on situations where using threads will not help.

Describes a number of general purpose debugging techniques for multi-threaded applications.

So far multithreaded file I/O is a under-researched field. Although its simple to measure, there is not much common knowledge about it. The measurements presented here show that multithreading can improve performance of file access directly, as well a...

Looks at how lock-free programming avoids system failure by tolerating individual process failures.

Use of synchronization mechanisms like semaphores, monitors, and critical regions can lead to uncontrolled priority inversion.