Towards Lock Modularization for Heterogeneous Environments

Abstract: Modern hardware environments are becoming increasingly heterogeneous, leading to the emergence of applications specifically designed to exploit this heterogeneity. Efficiently adopting locks in these applications poses distinct challenges. The uneven distribution of resources in such environments can create bottlenecks for lock operations, severely hindering application performance. Existing solutions are often tailored to specific types of hardware, which underutilizes resources on other components within heterogeneous environments. This paper introduces a new design principle: decomposing locks across hardware components to fully utilize unevenly distributed resources in heterogeneous environments. Following this principle, we propose lock modularization, a systematic approach that decomposes a lock into independent modules and assigns them to appropriate hardware components. This approach aligns the resource requirements of lock modules with the attributes of specific hardware components, maximizing strengths while minimizing weaknesses.