Optimizing Synchronization Operations for Remote Memory Communication Systems

Synchronization operations, such as fence and locking, are used in many parallel operations accessing shared memory. However, a process which is blocked waiting for a fence operation to complete, or for a lock to be acquired, cannot perform useful computation. It is therefore critical that these operations be implemented as efficiently as possible to reduce the time a process waits idle. These operations also impact the scalability of the overall system. As system sizes get larger, the number of processes potentially requesting a lock increases. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of an optimized operation which combines a global fence operation and a barrier synchronization operation. We also describe our implementation of an optimized lock algorithm. The optimizations have been incorporated into the ARMCI communication library. The global fence and barrier operation gives a factor of improvement of up to 9 over the current implementation in a 16 node system, while the optimized lock implementation gives up to 1.25 factor of improvement. These optimizations allow for more efficient and scalable applications.