A method for deterministic locking in a parallel computing environment is provided. The method includes creating a data structure in memory of a computer for a shared resource. The data structure encapsulates a reference to an owner of a lock for the shared resource and a queue of threads able to seek exclusive access to the shared resource. The queue in turn includes different entries, each entry including an identifier for a corresponding one of the threads and a deterministic time computed for the corresponding one of the threads from a count of memory accesses occurring in the corresponding one of the threads. Consequently, a thread can be selected from the queue to receive ownership of the lock and exclusive access to the shared resource based upon a deterministic time for the selected thread as compared to other deterministic times for others of the threads in the queue, for example, a lowest deterministic time.