Hardware and software consistency protocols rely on global observability of consistency events. Acknowledged broadcast is an obvious choice to propagate these events. This paper presents a generalized ring topology for parallel event propagation with acknowledged delivery. Implementations for various many-core architectures show increased performance over conventional approaches. Therefore, diamond rings are a prime candidate for implementations of distributed memory models.
With the evolution toward fast networks of many-core processors, the design assumptions at the basis of software-level distributed shared memory (DSM) systems change considerably. But efficient DSMs are needed because they can significantly simplify the implementation of complex distributed algorithms. This paper discusses implications of the many-core evolution and derives a set of reusable elementary operations for future software DSMs. These elementary operations will help in exploring and evaluating new memory models and consistency protocols.