A Framework for Wait-Free Data Exchange in Massively Threaded VR Systems

A central part of virtual reality systems and game engines is the generation, management and distribution of all relevant world states. In modern interactive graphic software systems usually many independent software components need to communicate and exchange data. Standard approaches suffer the n2 problem because the number of interfaces grows quadratically with the number of component functionalities. Such many-to-many architectures quickly become unmaintainable, not to mention latencies of standard concurrency control mechanisms. We present a novel method to manage concurrent multithreaded access to shared data in virtual environments. Our highly efficient low-latency and lightweight architecture is based on a new wait-free hash map using key-value pairs. This allows us to reduce the traditional many-to-many problem to a simple many-to-one approach. Our results show that our framework outperforms by more than two orders of magnitude standard lock-based but also modern lock-free methods significantly.