A Fine-Grain Parallel Architecture Based on Barrier Synchronization

Although barrier synchronization has long been considered a useful construct for parallel programming, it has generally been either layered on top of a communication system or used as a completely independent mechanism. Instead, we propose that all communication be made a side-effect of barrier synchronization. This is done by extending the barrier synchronization unit to collect a datum from each processor, compute an aggregate function, and return the corresponding result to each processor.