Supporting fine-grained synchronization on a simultaneous multithreading processor

This paper proposes and evaluates new synchronization schemes for a simultaneous multithreaded processor. We present a scalable mechanism that permits threads to cheaply synchronize within the processor, with blocked threads consuming no processor resources. We also introduce the concept of lock rel...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inProceedings Fifth International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture pp. 54 - 58
Main Authors Tullsen, D.M., Lo, J.L., Eggers, S.J., Levy, H.M.
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 1999
Subjects
Computer science
Costs
Hardware
Lifting equipment
Multithreading
Parallel processing
Program processors
Programming profession
Surface-mount technology
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Summary:This paper proposes and evaluates new synchronization schemes for a simultaneous multithreaded processor. We present a scalable mechanism that permits threads to cheaply synchronize within the processor, with blocked threads consuming no processor resources. We also introduce the concept of lock release prediction, which gains an additional improvement of 40%. Overall, we show that these improvements in synchronization cost enable parallelization of code that could not be effectively parallelized using traditional techniques.
ISBN:9780769500041
0769500048
DOI:10.1109/HPCA.1999.744326