Abstract for Tullsen, Lo, Eggers, Levy "Supporting Fine-Grained Synchronization on a Simultaneous Multithreading Processor"
This paper proposes and evaluates new synchronization schemes for a
simultaneous multithreaded processor. We present a scalable mechanism
that permits threads to cheaply synchronize within the processor, with
blocked threads consuming no processor resources.
We also introduce the concept of
lock release prediction,
which gains an additional
improvement of 40%. Overall, we show that these
improvements in
synchronization cost enable parallelization of code that could not be
effectively parallelized using traditional techniques.