An Efficient Processor Synchronization Scheme on Shared Memory Multiprocessor

공유메모리 다중처리기에서 효율적인 프로세서 동기화 기법

Many kinds of large scale multiprocessing and parallel-processing systems have recently been developed. The contention on the shared data caused by multiple processors may degrade system performance. So, processor synchronization has become one of the important issues in these systems. To solve the synchornization issues, a lot of software and hardware schemes based on spin lock have been proposed. Although software schemes are easy to implement, hardware schemes are preferred in many systems to gain optimized performance. This paper proposes an efficient processor synchronization scheme, called QCX,and describes its design considerations, hardware, algorithm, protocol. Also, in this paper, the performance of QCX has been evaluated with QOLB[5] and LBP[7] using a simulation. The simulation, with varying the number of processor and the contention on shared variables, measured the average execution times of a workload. The simulation results show that the performances of QCX is best when practicability is considered. QCX is more efficient than QOLB and LBP in two aspects. First, the hardware of QCX is more simple and cost-effective because the cache structure need not be changed. Secondly, QCX is more general because it uses a generic atomic instruction.