Study on Fine-Grained Synchronization in Many-Core Architecture

The synchronization between threads has serious impact on the performance of many-core architecture. When communication is frequent, coarse-grained synchronization brings significant overhead. Thus, coarse-grained synchronization is not suitable for this situation. However, the overhead of fine-grained synchronization is still small when the communication is frequent. For the many-core architecture which supports fine-grained synchronization with on-chip storage, we propose fine-grained synchronization algorithms for scientific computation application 2-D wavefront and LU decomposition. At first, according to the memory access mode, an efficient method of data allocation is proposed. Then, way of thread partition and synchronization are discussed. Finally, we estimate the two algorithms based on Godson-T many-core architecture. The results of experiments show that the relative speedup is almost linear and the execution time is only 53.2 % of the coarse-grained synchronization. After the global barriers are eliminated, LU decomposition achieved 13.1% performance improvement. Moreover, the experiments prove that the fine-grained mechanism is able to improve the performance of processor and it has a good scalability.