Fast barrier synchronization hardware

A special-purpose hardware scheme uniquely tailored to barrier synchronization is presented. It allows barrier synchronization to be performed within a single instruction cycle for moderately sized systems, and is scalable with logarithmic increase in synchronization time. It supports a large number of concurrent barriers, and can also be used to support a number of different barrier synchronization schemes. The hardware is relatively simple and inexpensive. Simulation results have shown that, under reasonable assumptions, it can decrease typical parallel-loop execution time significantly, especially for fine-grained and statically scheduled loops.<
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