Preliminary results on nb-feb, a synchronization primitive for parallel programming

Authors:
Phuong Hoai Ha;Philippas Tsigas;Otto J. Anshus
Affiliations:
University of Tromso, Tromso, Norway;Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden;University of Tromso, Tromso, Norway
Venue:
Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and practice of parallel programming
Year:
2009

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Abstract

We introduce a non-blocking full/empty bit primitive, or NB-FEB for short, as a promising synchronization primitive for parallel programming on may-core architectures. We show that the NB-FEB primitive is universal, scalable and feasible. NB-FEB, together with registers, can solve the consensus problem for an arbitrary number of processes (universality). NB-FEB is combinable, namely its memory requests to the same memory location can be combined into only one memory request, which consequently mitigates performance degradation due to synchronization "hot spots" (scalability). Since NB-FEB is a variant of the original full/empty bit that always returns a value instead of waiting for a conditional flag, it is as feasible as the original full/empty bit, which has been implemented in many computer systems (feasibility).