Fast synchronization on shared-memory multiprocessors: An architectural approach

  • Authors:

  • Zhen Fang;Lixin Zhang;John B. Carter;Liqun Cheng;Michael Parker

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Computing, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84112, USA;IBM Austin Research Laboratory, 11400 Burnet Road, MS 904/6C019, Austin, TX 78758, USA;School of Computing, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84112, USA;School of Computing, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84112, USA;Cray, Inc., 1050 Lowater Road, Chippewa Falls, WI 54729, USA

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing - Special issue: Design and performance of networks for super-, cluster-, and grid-computing: Part I
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Synchronization is a crucial operation in many parallel applications. Conventional synchronization mechanisms are failing to keep up with the increasing demand for efficient synchronization operations as systems grow larger and network latency increases. The contributions of this paper are threefold. First, we revisit some representative synchronization algorithms in light of recent architecture innovations and provide an example of how the simplifying assumptions made by typical analytical models of synchronization mechanisms can lead to significant performance estimate errors. Second, we present an architectural innovation called active memory that enables very fast atomic operations in a shared-memory multiprocessor. Third, we use execution-driven simulation to quantitatively compare the performance of a variety of synchronization mechanisms based on both existing hardware techniques and active memory operations. To the best of our knowledge, synchronization based on active memory outforms all existing spinlock and non-hardwired barrier implementations by a large margin.