On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 08:52, Dmitry Karpeev <[email protected]> wrote:

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From what I understand Barry doesn't want the threads to spin.

Lots of MPI calls spin because it's MUCH lower latency. Unless we have more threads than cores, what is the problem?

Also, synchronizing through an unguarded memory location seems to create a race conditions.

Not if writes are atomic. There is always a way to do atomic writes (usually machine-word) because otherwise the operating system could not implement synchronization primitives. Isn't cmpxchg instruction-set specific?

All instruction sets have some analogue of cmpxchg because it's the building block for all other primitives.