Support for Fine-Grained Synchronization in Shared-Memory Multiprocessors

Abstract. It has been already verified that hardware-supported finegrain synchronization provides a significant performance improvement over coarse-grained synchronization mechanisms, such as barriers. Support for fine-grain synchronization on individual data items becomes notably important in order to efficiently exploit thread-level parallelism available on multi-threading and multi-core processors. Fine-grained synchronization can be achieved using the full/empty tagged shared memory. We define the complete set of synchronizing memory instructions as well as the architecture of the full/empty tagged shared memory that provides support for these operations. We develop a snoopy cache coherency protocol for an SMP with the centralized full/empty tagged memory.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: PACT
• Authors: Vladimir Vlassov, Oscar Sierra Merino, Csaba Andras Moritz, Konstantin Popov
• Keywords: Coarse-grained Synchronization Mechanisms, Distributed And Parallel Computing, PACT 2007, Synchronization, Tagged Shared Memory