Synchronization mechanisms on modern multi-core architectures
ACSAC'07 Proceedings of the 12th Asia-Pacific conference on Advances in Computer Systems Architecture
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A chip-multiprocessor is one of the promising architectures that can overcome the ILP limitation, high power consumption and high heating that current processors face. On a shared memory multiprocessor, a performance improvement relies on an efficient communication and synchronization method via shared variables. The TSVM cache combines communication and synchronization with the coherence maintenance on a chip-multiprocessor. That is, the communication and synchronization via shared variables are realized by one coherence transaction through a high- speed on chip inter-connection. The TSVM cache provides several instructions that each instruction has the individual coherence maintenance scheme. The combinations of these instructions can realize the producer-consumers synchronization, mutual exclusion and barrier synchronization with communication easily and systematically. This paper describes how those instructions construct three primitives and shows effect of these primitives using a clock cycle accurate simulator written in VHDL. The result shows that the TSVM cache can improve a performance of 9.8 times compared with a traditional cache memory, and improve a performance of 2 times compared with a conventional cache memory with synchronization mechanism.