Practical barrier synchronisation

We investigate the performance of barrier synchronisation on both shared memory and distributed memory architectures, using a wide range of techniques. The performance results obtained show that distributed memory architectures behave predictably, although their performance for barrier synchronisation is relatively poor. For shared memory architectures, a much larger range of implementation techniques are available. We show that asymptotic analysis is useless, and a detailed understanding of the underlying hardware is required to design an effective barrier implementation. We show that a technique using cache coherence is more effective than semaphore or lock based techniques, and is competitive with specialised barrier synchronisation hardware