Abstract: A new synchronization system synchronizes data exchanges between producer processes and consumer processes which may be on the same or different processors in a multiprocessor system. The synchronization incurs less than one roundtrip of latency - in some implementations, in approximately 0.5 roundtrip times. A key aspect of the fast synchronization is that the producer’s data store is followed without delay with the updating of a barrier on which the consumer is waiting.

Abstract: A new transaction barrier synchronization primitive enables executing threads and asynchronous transactions to synchronize across parallel processors. The asynchronous transactions may include transactions resulting from, for example, hardware data movement units such as direct memory units, etc. A hardware synchronization circuit may provide for the synchronization primitive to be stored in a cache memory so that barrier operations may be accelerated by the circuit. A new wait mechanism reduces software overhead associated with waiting on a barrier.