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HPCA
2007
IEEE

Colorama: Architectural Support for Data-Centric Synchronization

14 years 4 months ago
Colorama: Architectural Support for Data-Centric Synchronization
With the advent of ubiquitous multi-core architectures, a major challenge is to simplify parallel programming. One way to tame one of the main sources of programming complexity, namely synchronization, is transactional memory (TM). However, we argue that TM does not go far enough, since the programmer still needs nonlocal reasoning to decide where to place transactions in the code. A significant improvement to the art is Data-Centric Synchronization (DCS), where the programmer uses local reasoning to assign synchronization constraints to data. Based on these, the system automatically infers critical sections and inserts synchronization operations. This paper proposes novel architectural support to make DCS feasible, and describes its programming model and interface. The proposal, called Colorama, needs only modest hardware extensions, supports general-purpose, pointer-based languages such as C/C++ and, in our opinion, can substantially simplify the task of writing new parallel program...
Luis Ceze, Pablo Montesinos, Christoph von Praun,
Added 01 Dec 2009
Updated 01 Dec 2009
Type Conference
Year 2007
Where HPCA
Authors Luis Ceze, Pablo Montesinos, Christoph von Praun, Josep Torrellas
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