Synchronizing Parallel Geometric Algorithms on Multi-Core Machines

Abstract

A thread synchronization mechanism dubbed Spatial Locks for parallel geometric algorithms is presented. We show that Spatial Locks ensure thread synchronization on geometric algorithms that perform concurrent operations on geometric surfaces in two-dimensional or three-dimensional space. The proposed technique respects the fact that these operations follow a certain order of processing, i.e. priorities. Parallelizing these kinds of geometric algorithms using Spatial Locks requires only a simple parameter initialization, rather than modifying the algorithms themselves together with their internal data structures. A parallel algorithm for mesh simplification is chosen to show the Spatial Locks usefulness when parallelizing geometric algorithms with ease on multi-core machines. Experimental results illustrate the advantage of using this synchronization mechanism where significant computational improvement can be achieved compared to alternative approaches.