Fundamental Results for a Generic Implementation of Barriers using Optical Interconnects

Abstract

In this report, we report some fundamental results and bounds on the number of messages and storage required to implement barriers using futuristic on-chip optical and RF networks. We prove that it is necessary to maintain a count to at least N (number of threads) in memory, broadcast the barrier id at least once, and if we elect a co-ordinator, we can reduce the number of messages by a factor of O(N ).