ActiveMonitor: Non-blocking Monitor Executions for Increased Parallelism

Abstract: We present a set of novel ideas on design and implementation of monitor objects for multi-threaded programs. Our approach has two main goals: (a) increase parallelism in monitor objects and thus provide performance gains (shorter runtimes) for multi-threaded programs, and (b) introduce constructs that allow programmers to easily write monitor-based multi-threaded programs that can achieve these performance gains. We describe the concepts of our framework, called ActiveMonitor, and its prototype implementation using futures. We evaluate its performance in terms of runtimes of multi-threaded programs on linked-list, bounded-buffer, and other fundamental problems implemented in Java. We compare the runtimes of our implementation against implementations using Java's reentrant locks, recently proposed automatic signaling framework AutoSynch, and some other techniques from the literature. The results of of the evaluation indicate that monitors based on our framework provide significant gains in runtime performance in comparison to traditional monitors implemented using Java's reentrant locks.