Scaling Existing Lock-based Applications with Lock Elision: Lock elision enables existing lock-based programs to achieve the performance benefits of nonblocking synchronization and fine-grain locking with minor software engineering effort.

Multithreaded applications take advantage of increasing core counts to achieve high performance. Such programs, however, typically require programmers to reason about data shared among multiple threads. Programmers use synchronization mechanisms such as mutual-exclusion locks to ensure correct updates to shared data in the presence of accesses from multiple threads. Unfortunately, these mechanisms serialize thread accesses to the data and limit scalability.