Connecting the distributed hardware agents for barrier synchronization operation

Abstract

One of the simple distributed ways to coordinate the arrival or release between groups of threads that participate to the same global events is through a logical-tree of hardware agents. This organization transfers the processing responsibility of the intercluster barrier synchronization from the distributed groups of threads to the participating hardware agents. For interconnected multiprocessor clusters that support distributed memorized embedded boards (DMEB), we have developed the software platform to logically connect the hardware agents as nodes in a logical-tree. We restrict our contribution in this paper to the global-barrier synchronization. Index terms barrier operation, communication pattern, and memorized embedded board.