Cycle-level thread alignment on multi-threaded processors

摘要

A time-of-day (TOD) clock is leveraged to provide a high-resolution measure of the real time that is suitable for the indication of date and time to perform cycle-level thread synchronization. A time-of-day value provided by the time-of-day clock is used in a spin lock, along with a configurable mask, to meet a specified condition. The condition is met at regular time intervals and at the same time for all the hardware threads to be synchronized. When the condition is met and synchronization is reached, execution of the threads continues ensuring that the activity generated on each thread is in synchronization.