Abstract
While the semiconductor industry has provided us with powerful systems for personal supercomputing, how to efficiently harness the computing power of these systems still remains a major unsolved problem. This challenge must be approached by simultaneously solving the synchronization problem and the parallel programmability problem. This paper reviews the synchronization issues in modern parallel computer architectures, surveys the state of the art approaches used to alleviate these problems, and proposes our Request-Store-Forward (RSF) model of synchronization. This model splits the atomic synchronization operations into two phases, thus freeing the processing elements from polling operations. Finally, we show how we could learn from nature and improve the overall system performance by closely coupling peripheral computing units and functional units.
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Liu, S., Gaudiot, JL. (2007). Synchronization Mechanisms on Modern Multi-core Architectures. In: Choi, L., Paek, Y., Cho, S. (eds) Advances in Computer Systems Architecture. ACSAC 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4697. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74309-5_28
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74309-5_28
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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