Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Synchronization but Were Afraid to Ask

This paper presents the most exhaustive study of synchronization to date. We span multiple layers, from hardware cache-coherence protocols up to high-level concurrent software. We do so on different types of architectures, from single-socket - uniform and non-uniform - to multi-socket - directory and broadcast-based - many-cores. We draw a set of observations that, roughly speaking, imply that scalability of synchronization is mainly a property of the hardware. © 2013 ACM.