Concurrent operations on priority queues

Abstract

Amon^ the fastest priority queue implementations, skew heaps have properties that make them particularly suited to concurrent manipulation of shared queues. A concurrent version of the top down implementation of skew heaps can be produced from previously published sequential versions using almost mechanical transformations. This implementation requires O(log n] time to enqueue or dequeue an item, but it allows new operations to begin after orily 0(1) time on a MIMD machine. Thus, there is potential for significant concurrency when multiple processes share a queue. Appilications to problems in graph theory and simulation are discussed in this article.

An application of program unification to priority queue vectorization

“…7 and 8) of various priority queue implementations. In an interesting study, Jones (9) proposes that some implementations, particularly skew heaps, lend themselves to efficient concurrent operations, thus indicative of potential for speedup in shared memory multiprocessor settings. In a theoretical vein, Olariu and Wen designed parallel initialization algorithms for priority queues.…”

“…(') In all previous studies of the efficiency of priority queue implementations, the focus has been either on scalar uniprocessing or scalar multiprocessing (in a shared memory system) of a single priority queue. (1,9)This is a natural feature to study when the underlying application is assumed to be a single simulation, generating a single sample-path of the stochastic process of interest. In contrast, our focus is on using vector machines to generate several (usually, but not necessarily, independent) sample-paths of the process in parallel The device used to achieve this is the technique of program unification (1~ which allows for the algorithmic transformation of a sequential program into a unified, vector program.…”

Concurrent Data Structures

“…Ayani [11] improved on their algorithm by suggesting a way to have consecutive insertions be performed on opposite sides of the heap. Jones [68] suggests a scheme similar to [116] based on a skew heap.…”

Multi-model parallel programming in psyche

“…The algorithm for concurrent priority queues can be adapted from [17]. The external interface of the queue includes two operations: insert and deletemin.…”