FastForward for Efficient Pipeline Parallelism

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.