Subject: tutorial on Shared memory issues

From: Rusty Lusk <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 May 1996 11:01:37 -0500

Dear group,

For those who would like to better understand the issues surrounding some of
the discussions in the 1-sided communication subcommittee, I highly recommend
the excellent paper

  Shared Memory Consistency Models:  A Tutorial

  by Sarita Adve and Kourosh Gharachorloo

This is quite easy to read and uses as examples just exactly the sorts of
things people are going to want to do with put/get.  It presents the memory
model that most *users* have of shared memory, explains how modern CPUs do not
support this model, and what kinds of steps (e.g. fence) need to be taken by
programmers (or compilers, or libraries) to reconstruct the model while still
allowing optimizations.  I wish that I had read this months ago, but it is not
too late.

It is available from the Web page:

  http://www.research.digital.com/wrl/techreports/abstracts/95.7.html

(A link on that page will get you the postscript of the full 22-page paper.)

Regards,
Rusty