WEAK MEMORY CONSISTENCY MODELS PART II:PROCESS COORDINATION PROBLEMS
Date
1998-01-01
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Abstract
Process coordination problems have been extensively addressed in the context
of sequential consistency. However, modern multiprocessors present a large
variety of memory models that are anything but sequentially consistent. In
these machines, the ordering constraints on memory accesses are few. We
re-address two fundamental process coordination problems in the context of
weak memory models. We prove that many models cannot support a solution to
the critical section problem without additional powerful synchronization
primitives. Nevertheless, we show that certain versions of the
producer/consumer problem can be solved even in the weakest models without
the need for such powerful instructions. These instructions are expensive,
and avoiding their use is desirable for better performance.
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Computer Science