Speeding-up Synchronizations in DSM Multiprocessors?

Abstract. Synchronization in parallel programs is a major performance bottleneck. Shared data is protected by locks and a lot of time is spent in the competition arising at the lock hand-off. In this period of time, a large amount of traffic is targeted to the line holding the lock variable. In order to be serialized, the requests to the same cache line can either be bounced (NACKed) or buffered in the coherence controller. In this paper we focus on systems whose coherence controllers buffer requests. During lock hand-off only the requests from the winning processor con-tribute to the computation progress, because the winning processor is the only one that will advance the work. This key observation leads us to propose a hardware mechanism named Request Bypass, which allows re-quests from the winning processor to bypass the requests buffered in the home coherence controller keeping the lock line. The mechanism does not require compiler or programmer support nor ISA or coherence protocol changes. By simulating a 32 processor system we show that Request Bypass re-duces execution time and lock stall time up to 35 % and 75%, respectively. The programs limited by synchronization benefit the most from Request Bypass.