Lock-free Concurrent Data Structures

Concurrent data structures are the data sharing side of parallel programming. Data structures give the means to the program to store data, but also provide operations to the program to access and manipulate these data. These operations are implemented through algorithms that have to be efficient. In the sequential setting, data structures are crucially important for the performance of the respective computation. In the parallel programming setting, their importance becomes more crucial because of the increased use of data and resource sharing for utilizing parallelism. The first and main goal of this chapter is to provide a sufficient background and intuition to help the interested reader to navigate in the complex research area of lock-free data structures. The second goal is to offer the programmer familiarity to the subject that will allow her to use truly concurrent methods.Comment: To appear in "Programming Multi-core and Many-core Computing Systems", eds. S. Pllana and F. Xhafa, Wiley Series on Parallel and Distributed Computin

Enhanced molecular dynamics performance with a programmable graphics processor

Design considerations for molecular dynamics algorithms capable of taking advantage of the computational power of a graphics processing unit (GPU) are described. Accommodating the constraints of scalable streaming-multiprocessor hardware necessitates a reformulation of the underlying algorithm. Performance measurements demonstrate the considerable benefit and cost-effectiveness of such an approach, which produces a factor of 2.5 speed improvement over previous work for the case of the soft-sphere potential.Comment: 20 pages (v2: minor additions and changes; v3: corrected typos