Capturing Register and Control Dependence in Memory Consistency Models with Applications to the Itanium Architecture

A complete framework for modelling memory consistency that includes register and control dependencies is presented. It allows us to determine whether or not a given computation could have arisen from a given program running on a given multiprocessor architecture. The framework is used to provide an exact description of the computations of (a subset of) the Itanium instruction set on an Itanium multiprocessor architecture. We show that capturing register and control dependencies is crucial: a producer/consumer problem is solvable without using strong synchronization primitives on Itanium multiprocessors, but is impossible without exploiting these dependencies.