Lazy Release Consistency for Hardware-Coherent Multiprocessors.

Release consistency is a widely accepted memory model for distributed shared memory systems. It provides significant opportunities for a coherence protocol to improve performance by delaying and buffering coherence operations. Different protocol implementations exploit these opportunities to different extents. Eager release consistency represents the state of the art for hardware-coherent multiprocessors, while lazy release consistency has been shown to provide better performance for software distributed shared memory DSM. Several of the optimizations performed by lazy protocols have the potential to improve the performance of hardware coherent multiprocessors, but their complexity has precluded a hardware implementation. With the advent of programmable protocol processors it may become possible to use them after all.