A Calculus for Relaxed Memory

8 years 10 days ago

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We propose a new approach to programming multi-core, relaxed-memory architectures in imperative, portable programming languages. Our memory model is based on explicit, programmer-speciﬁed requirements for order of execution and the visibility of writes. The compiler then realizes those requirements in the most eﬃcient manner it can. This is in contrast to existing memory models, which—if they allow programmer control over synchronization at all—are based on inferring the execution and visibility consequences of synchronization operations or annotations in the code. We formalize our memory model in a core calculus called RMC. Outside of the programmer’s speciﬁed requirements, RMC is designed to be strictly more relaxed than existing architectures. It employs an aggressively nondeterministic semantics for expressions, in which actions can be executed in nearly any order, and a store semantics that generalizes Sarkar, et al.’s and Alglave, et al.’s models of the Power arc...

Karl Crary, Michael J. Sullivan

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