Automatic Implementation of Programming Language Consistency Models

Concurrent threads executing on a shared memory system can access the same memory locations. A consistency model defines constraints on the order of these shared memory accesses. For good run-time performance, these constraints must be as few as possible. Programmers who write explicitly parallel programs must take into account the consistency model when reasoning about the behavior of their programs. Also, the consistency model constrains compiler transformations that reorder code. It is not known what consistency models best suit the needs of the programmer, the compiler, and the hardware simultaneously. We are building a compiler infrastructure to study the effect of consistency models on code optimization and run-time performance. The consistency model presented to the user will be a programmable feature independent of the hardware consistency model. The compiler will be used to mask the hardware consistency model from the user by mapping the software consistency model onto the hardware consistency model. When completed, our compiler will be used to prototype consistency models and to measure the relative performance of different consistency models. We present preliminary experimental data for performance of a software implementation of sequential consistency using manual inter-thread analysis.