Question

In multicore systems, such as 2, 4, 8 cores, we typically use mutexes and semaphores to access shared memory. However, I can foresee that these methods would induce a high overhead for future systems with many cores. Are there any alternative methods that would be better for future many core systems for accessing shared memories.

Answer 1

I’m not sure how far in the future you want to go. But in the long-long run, shared memory as we know it right now (single address space accessible by any core) is not scalable. So the programming model will have to change at some point and make the lives of programmers harder as it did when we went to multi-core.

But for now (perhaps for another 10 years) you can get away with transactional memory and other hardware/software tricks.

The reason I say shared-memory is not scalable in the long run is simply due to physics. (similar to how single-core/high-frequency hit a barrier)

In short, transistors can’t shrink to less than the size of an atom (barring new technology), and signals can’t propagate faster than the speed of light. Therefore, memory will get slower and slower (with respect to the processor) and at some point, it becomes infeasible to share memory.

We can already see this effect right now with NUMA on the multi-socket systems. Large-scale supercomputers are neither shared-memory nor cache-coherent.