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Summary:
Weak Ordering A New Definition +
Sarita V. Adve
Mark D. Hill
Computer Sciences Department
University of Wisconsin
Madison, Wisconsin 53706
ABSTRACT
A memory model for a shared memory, multipro
cessor commonly and often implicitly assumed by pro
grammers is that of sequential consistency. This model
guarantees that all memory accesses will appear to exe
cute atomically and in program order. An alternative
model, weak ordering, offers greater performance
potential. Weak ordering was first defined by Dubois,
Scheurich and Briggs in terms of a set of rules for
hardware that have to be made visible to software.
The central hypothesis of this work is that pro
grammers prefer to reason about sequentially consistent
memory, rather than having to think about weaker
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