A Comparison Between HTM and Lock-Free Algorithms

As the number of CPU cores packed in a single SoC increases, scalability of algorithms becomes important. In this presentation, I will talk about Hardware Transactional Memory (HTM) and Lock-Free mechanisms in terms of basic working, requirements, and challenges. Both of these mechanisms improve scalability and thereby speed up the execution of multi-threaded software. DPDK is in a unique position wherein the rte_hash library implements an HTM optimized algorithm as well as a lock-free algorithm. This presentation will further talk about the performance comparison of HTM and Lock-Free in rte_hash library.