A flexible hardware barrier mechanism for many-core processors

This paper proposes a new hardware barrier mechanism which offers the flexibility to select which cores should join the synchronization, allowing for executing multiple multi-threaded applications by dividing a many-core processor into several groups. Experimental results based on an RTL simulation show that our hardware barrier achieves a 66-fold reduction in latency over typical software based implementations, with a hardware overhead of the processor of only 1.8%. Additionally, we demonstrate that the proposed mechanism is sufficiently flexible to cover a variety of core groups with minimal hardware overhead.