FastForward for Efficient Pipeline Parallelism [abstract] (ACM DL, PDF, Poster PDF)
John Giacomoni, Tipp Moseley, and Manish Vachharajani
Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT), September 2007. [Poster.]

High-rate core-to-core communication is critical for efficient pipeline-parallel software architectures. This paper introduces FastForward, a software-only low-overhead high-rate queue algorithm for pipeline parallelism on multicore architectures. FastForward uses an architecturally-tuned domain-specific adaptation of concurrent lock-free queues to provide low-latency and low-overhead core-to-core communication. Enqueue and dequeue times on a 2~GHz Opteron 270 based system are as low as 36~ns, up to 4x faster than Lamport's solution