Abstract
In the early 1980s, shared memory mini-super-computers had buses and memory whose speeds were relatively fast compared to processor speeds. This led to the widespread use of various producer/consumer (post/wait) synchronization schemes for enforcing data dependences within parallel doacross loops. The rise of the “killer micro”, instruction sets optimized for serial programs, and rapidly increasing processor clock rates driven by Moore’s law, led to special purpose synchronization instructions being replaced by software barriers combined with loop fission (to allow the barriers to enforce dependences.) One cost of this approach is poorer cache behavior because variables on which a dependence exists are now accessed in separate loops. With the advent of the multicore era, producer/consumer synchronization again appears plausible. In this paper we compare the performance of hardware and software synchronization schemes to barrier synchronization, and show that either hardware or software based producer/consumer synchronization can provide applications with superior performance.
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Lin, H., Bae, H., Midkiff, S.P., Eigenmann, R., Kim, S.P. (2013). A Study of the Usefulness of Producer/Consumer Synchronization. In: Rajopadhye, S., Mills Strout, M. (eds) Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing. LCPC 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7146. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36036-7_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36036-7_10
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