Technical Report no. 2002-02 NOBLE: A Non-Blocking Inter-Process Communication Library 1

Abstract

Many applications on shared memory multi-processor machines can benefit from the exploitation of parallelism that non-blocking synchronization offers. In this paper, we introduce a library support for multi-process non-blocking synchronization called NOBLE. NOBLE provides an interprocess communication interface that allows the user to select synchronization methods transparently to the one that suits best for the current application. The library provides a collection of the most commonly used data types and protocols in a form, which allows them to be used by non-experts. We describe the functionality and the implementation of the library functions and illustrate the library programming style with example programs. The examples show that using the library can considerably reduce the runtime on distributed shared memory machines.