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

Published: 14 February 2009 Publication History

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).

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
PPoPP '09: Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and practice of parallel programming
February 2009
322 pages
ISBN:9781605583976
DOI:10.1145/1504176
  • cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices
    ACM SIGPLAN Notices  Volume 44, Issue 4
    PPoPP '09
    April 2009
    294 pages
    ISSN:0362-1340
    EISSN:1558-1160
    DOI:10.1145/1594835
    Issue’s Table of Contents
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Publication History

Published: 14 February 2009

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Author Tags

  1. combinability
  2. full/empty bit
  3. many-core architectures
  4. non-blocking synchronization
  5. universal primitives

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