Concurrent data structure

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In computer science, a concurrent data structure is a particular way of storing and organizing data for access by multiple computing threads (or processes) on a computer.

Historically, such data structures were used on uniprocessor machines with operating systems that supported multiple computing threads (or processes). The term concurrency captured the multiplexing/interleaving of the threads' operations on the data by the operating system, even though the processors never issued two operations that accessed the data simultaneously.

Today, as multiprocessor computer architectures that provide parallelism become the dominant computing platform (through the proliferation of multi-core processors), the term has come to stand mainly for data structures that can be accessed by multiple threads which may actually access the data simultaneously because they run on different processors that communicate with one another. The concurrent data structure (sometimes also called a shared data structure) is usually considered to reside in an abstract storage environment called shared memory, though this memory may be physically implemented as either a "tightly coupled" or a distributed collection of storage modules.