Blowing up the (C++11) Atomic Barrier
53Google Tech Talk
October 27, 2014
Presented by Robin Morisset
ABSTRACT
Atomics in C11 and C++11 let the programmer express the guarantees needed for racy accesses in lock-free code, in theory bringing a zero-cost abstraction for parallelism to the language. This talk will showcase how you can use atomics today and where the abstraction breaks down. We’ll focus on LLVM’s recent improvements for atomics that provide significant performance gains on ARMv7, Power and x86. Finally we’ll discuss some extremely non-intuitive behaviors of atomics, how atomics in C++ may evolve, and how it may impact LLVM.
Slides can be found here:
https://docs.google.com/a/chromium.org/presentation/d/1Ok3NHezdnKLD4XSzI8WVwdMC07DR3w87n80Mj5ydtGE
Speaker Info:
Robin Morisset interned in Chrome's NaCl team for the summer, and focused on tuning C11/C++11 atomics in LLVM for x86/ARM/Power. He is a PhD Student at the ENS Paris.