View consistencies and exact implementations

✍ Scribed by Hon F. Li; Gabriel Girard

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2003
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 486 KB
• Volume: 29
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0167-8191
• DOI: 10.1016/s0167-8191(02)00148-5

✦ Synopsis

Numerous shared memory consistency models have appeared for the purpose of obtaining better shared memory parallel computers, ones which suffer less from long memory latency. This paper uses the primitive notion of program-order and value-order to define global view. Using this as a seed, various consistency models evolve and form hierarchies of models. The creation of these models comes naturally via one of the following means: (i) a global view is augmented with additional ordering among its operations whenever some orderings exist, or (ii) a global view should not contain certain orderings. The former involves augmentation rules, and the latter involves ordering requirements. These models may attract different implementations and a notion of exact implementation is developed. The usefulness of these models is also analyzed and exemplified.