Hardware Support for Durable Atomic Instructions for Persistent Parallel Programming

Persistent memory is emerging as an attractive main memory fabric capable of hosting persistent data. However, its programmability is hampered by the lack of persistent synchronization primitives. Atomic instructions are immensely useful for higher-level synchronization (locks and barriers) and for supporting lock-free data structures, but they have no durable/persistent version. In this paper, we propose a new approach to solve the problem: durable atomic instructions (DAIs). We show that DAIs can be supported with minor hardware support (low-cost modifications to the cache coherence protocol), and simultaneously achieve high performance, scalability, and crash consistency.