FastForward for Efficient Pipeline Parallelism: A Cache-Optimized Concurrent Lock-Free Queue [abstract] (ACM DL)
John Giacomoni, Tipp Moseley, and Manish Vachharajani
Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming (PPoPP), February 2008.

Low overhead core-to-core communication is critical for efficient pipeline-parallel software applications. This paper presents FastForward, a cache-optimized single-producer/single-consumer concurrent lock-free queue for pipeline parallelism on multicore architectures, with weak to strongly ordered consistency models. Enqueue and dequeue times on a 2.66 GHz Opteron 2218 based system are as low as 28.5 ns, up to 5x faster than the next best solution. FastForward's effectiveness is demonstrated for real applications by applying it to line-rate soft network processing on Gigabit Ethernet with general purpose commodity hardware.