9319445 Scott The goal of this research is to develop and evaluate synchronization techniques on very large scale shared memory mutliprocessor systems. With increases in size and availability of parallel processors, high-performance synchronization has become a critical factor in overall application performance and scalability. Among the techniques for synchronization include special-purpose hardware, active messages, lock-free data structures, and scalable software synchronization algorithms based on atomic fetch-and-o instructions. The choice of the synchronization approach plays a significant role on the overall performance. The PI proposes to concentrate his research on 1)comparative evaluation of software synchronization, lock- free data structures, active messages and special-purpose hardware primitives, 2)new synchronization algorithms that scale with the number of processors and utilize the available atomic instructions, and 3) new mechanisms for cooperative synchronization and scheduling which minimize the unnecessary spinning on locks, maximize processor locality and avoid contention for both lock and nonlock data. ***
