IWannaBit!

  • Authors:
  • Cliff Click

  • Affiliations:
  • Azul Systems, Mountain View, CA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2008 ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Memory systems performance and correctness: held in conjunction with the Thirteenth International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS '08)
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Just One Lousy Bit! I want to know if any memory operation misses or any line in my L1 cache gets evicted. Why? Because with this one Bit I can write any number of lock-free algorithms easily. This Bit gives me an N-word atomic read set, and with a typical Store Conditional instruction a 1-word atomic write set. The algorithm writing community has begged for D-CAS or Hardware Transactional Memory for years, but proposals far outstrip implementations: neither are available on any commodity system. With this Bit I hope to lower the hardware costs as low as possible while still being useful.