Runtime Support for Atomics

The following information is meant to describe the underlying runtime support for Chapel’s Atomic Variables.

For more information on Atomic Variables refer to the Atomic Variables section of the Chapel language specification.

For code examples using atomics, see the atomics.chpl primer.

Overview

Atomic variables are a built-in type that support predefined atomic operations. Currently, Chapel supports processor-provided atomic operations on bool, as well as all sizes of int, uint, and real for most backend compilers (see Setting up Your Environment for Chapel for the current list of supported compilers.) Initial support for network-provided atomic operations is also available. See the platform-specific documentation to check if network-based atomics are available for your platform

The choice of supported atomic variable types as well as the atomic operations were strongly influenced by the C11 standard. A notable exception is that Chapel supports atomic fetch-and-add/fetch-and-subtract operations on real types as well.

The specific implementation of atomics can be selected via the environment variable CHPL_ATOMICS. Similar to the other Chapel environment variables, an appropriate default is chosen when not specified, and not all implementations are available for all settings. Chapel currently supports three atomics implementations: cstdlib, intrinsics and locks. This environment variable also specifies the atomic implementation used by the Chapel runtime. cstdlib provides the best performance. For information on how the default is chosen see CHPL_ATOMICS.

Currently, unless using network atomics, all remote atomic operations will result in the calling task effectively migrating to the locale on which the atomic variable was allocated and performing the atomic operations locally.

If supported, the network atomics implementation can be selected via the environment variable CHPL_NETWORK_ATOMICS. If set, all variables declared to be atomic will use the specified network’s atomic operations. It is possible to override this default by using the undocumented internal function chpl__processorAtomicType() defined in $CHPL_HOME/modules/internal/Atomics.chpl. Over time we will add a more principled way for explicitly requesting processor atomics, and this function may disappear.

For more information about the runtime implementation see $CHPL_HOME/runtime/include/atomics/README.

Additional References

• See the section titled “Memory Consistency Model” in the Chapel Language Specification for more information on memory orders and Chapel’s memory consistency model.