The AMD Advanced Synchronization Facility (ASF) - perhaps of interest to the D programming community ?

Denis Koroskin 2korden at gmail.com
Fri Nov 13 00:43:18 PST 2009


On Fri, 13 Nov 2009 05:23:08 +0300, Nick B  
<nick_NOSPAM_.barbalich at gmail.com> wrote:

> Overview:
>
> The AMD Advanced Synchronization Facility (ASF) is an experimental  
> instruction set extension for the AMD64 architecture that would provide  
> new capabilities for efficient synchronization of access to shared data  
> in highly multithreaded applications as well as operating system  
> kernels. ASF provides a means for software to inspect and update  
> multiple shared memory locations atomically without having to rely on  
> locks for mutual exclusion. It is intended to facilitate lock-free  
> programming for highly concurrent shared data structures, allowing more  
> complex and higher performance manipulation of such structures than is  
> practical with traditional techniques based on compare-swap instructions  
> such as CMPXCHG16B. ASF code can also interoperate with lock-based code,  
> or with _Software Transactional Memory_.
>
> Some basic usage examples of ASF are provided in the specification.  
> However, we expect the programming community could readily use the power  
> and flexibility of ASF to implement very sophisticated, robust and  
> innovative concurrent data structure algorithms, and we encourage such  
> experimentation. AMD will be releasing a simulation framework in the  
> near future to facilitate this.
>
> AMD is releasing this proposal to encourage the parallel programming  
> community to review and comment on it. Such input will help shape the  
> ultimate direction of this feature, so that it may best serve the needs  
> of advanced parallel application developers.
>
> Discussion:
> http://forums.amd.com/devblog/blogpost.cfm?catid=317&threadid=114715&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AmdDeveloperBlogs+%28AMD+Developer+Blogs%29
>   and here
> http://forums.amd.com/devblog/blogpost.cfm?catid=317&threadid=118419&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AmdDeveloperBlogs+%28AMD+Developer+Blogs%29
>
>
> The spec can be found here:
>
> http://developer.amd.com/cpu/ASF/Pages/default.aspx
>
>
> regards
> Nick B

<offtopic>
Please start a new thread by clicking "Create New" button (or similar),  
not by replying to an existing thread. Thanks!
</offtopic>



More information about the Digitalmars-d mailing list