A Framework for the Investigation of Shared Memory Systems1

The behavior of programs running on a shared memory computer system is defined by the memory consistency model of its architecture. Since the consistency model does not only define behavior but inherently limits the efficiency of the memory system, research on memory models is still ongoing. There are several difficulties with the formulation of existing memory models. Different models use a different notation for operations with the same semantics, and similar synchronization primitives have different semantics. Also, there is no distinction between properties that hold for all memory models and properties that are model-specific. We propose a formal-ism that uses the same notation for all memory models, that has a unified set of synchronization primitives and that clearly separates general and model-specific proper-ties. This facilitates the classification and comparison of different consistency models.