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Summary: BulkSC: Bulk Enforcement of Sequential Consistency
Luis Ceze, James Tuck, Pablo Montesinos, and Josep Torrellas
Department of Computer Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
http://iacoma.cs.uiuc.edu
{luisceze,jtuck,pmontesi,torrellas}@cs.uiuc.edu
Abstract
While Sequential Consistency (SC) is the most intuitive memory
consistency model and the one most programmers likely assume,
current multiprocessors do not support it. Instead, they support more
relaxed models that deliver high performance. SC implementations
are considered either too slow or -- when they can match the per-
formance of relaxed models -- too difficult to implement.
In this paper, we propose Bulk Enforcement of SC (BulkSC), a
novel way of providing SC that is simple to implement and offers
performance comparable to Release Consistency (RC). The idea is
to dynamically group sets of consecutive instructions into chunks
that appear to execute atomically and in isolation. The hardware
enforces SC at the coarse grain of chunks which, to the program,
appears as providing SC at the individual memory access level.
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