Dynamic memory allocation in a parallel work environment relies on mutual exclusion locks in order to provide and protect consistency across shared data structures. Nevertheless, using locks and mutual exclusion techniques reduces performance and impacts program flexibility. A lock-free memory allocator guarantees progress regardless of whether some threads are delayed or even killed and regardless of scheduling policies.Some of the dynamic memory allocators we plan to analyze are:

​

1. tcmalloc: Thread Caching Malloc - TCMalloc assigns each thread a thread-local cache. Small allocations are satisfied from the thread-local cache. Objects are moved from central data structures into a thread-local cache as needed, and periodic garbage collections are used to migrate memory back from a thread-local cache into the central data structures.

2. Hoard: Hoard is a drop-in replacement for malloc that can dramatically improve application performance, especially for multithreaded programs running on multiprocessors and multicore CPUs.