🚀 go-pugleaf

chased@rbbb.Eng.Sun.COM (David Chase) writes:
>I've had this nagging suspicion for about a year that people building
>MP's were working awfully hard to maintain coherency where it just
>didn't matter.  Given that most of the programming languages tell you
>to lock your data if it is shared, the "we're guarding against this"
>examples always looked like buggy programs to me.  People have been
>working on this at Rice, I know, and at least one other place that I
>cannot recall right now.
 
  Along the same lines, we have implemented and experimented with
a software coherence strategy based on the notion that applications
explicitly lock/unlock shared data. It requires no hardware or 
compiler support, but does rely on the programmer to program "correctly". 
This is described in a paper that will be appearing in the 1993 ACM SigPlan
Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming in May:
"The Shared Regions Approach to Software Cache Coherence on
Multiprocessors". It will also be made available via ftp soon; send mail 
if you are interested.

    _harjinder

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  Harjinder  hsandhu@cs.toronto.edu
  Computer Systems Research Institute
  University of Toronto
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