Summary: SELECTED FOR PROC. OF THE IEEE, SPECIAL ISSUE ON DISTRIBUTED SHARED­MEMORY, 1999 (NOT THE FINAL VERSION) 1
Recent Advances in Memory Consistency Models for
Hardware Shared­Memory Systems
Sarita V. Adve, Vijay S. Pai, and Parthasarathy Ranganathan
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Rice University
Houston, Texas
rsim@ece.rice.edu
Abstract---
The memory consistency model of a shared­memory sys­
tem determines the order in which memory operations will
appear to execute to the programmer. The memory consis­
tency model for a system typically involves a tradeoff be­
tween performance and programmability. This paper pro­
vides an overview of recent advances in hardware optimiza­
tions, compiler optimizations, and programming environ­
ments relevant to memory consistency models of hardware
distributed shared­memory systems.
We discuss recent hardware and compiler optimizations
that exploit the observation that it is sufficient to only ap­

Source: Adve, Sarita - Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences