Out-of-Order Execution in Sequentially Consistent Shared-Memory Systems: Theory and Experiments

Traditional implementation of sequential consistency in shared-memory systems requires memory accesses to be globally performed in program order. Based on an event ordering model for correct executions in shared memory systems, this paper proposes and proves that out-of-order execution does not influence the correctness of an execution providing certain condition is met. Simulation results show that out-oforder execution proposed in this paper is an effective way to improve the performance of a sequentially consistent shared-memory system