DASH provides an easy to use interface for atomic operations similar to std::atomic<T> for elements stored in DASH containers. The STL atomic concept cannot be ported 1:1 as remote accesses require copying (amongst others).

The interface is as follows:

• Phantom type dash::Atomic<T> which can (only) be placed in DASH containers.
• Specialisation of dash::GlobRef<Atomic<T>> which provides interface of std::Atomic and proxies it to atomic DART calls. Methods which cannot be performed atomically are disabled / deleted.
• Function-based interface dash::atomic:: (works only for atomic types)
• DART interface for atomic operations which internally uses the corresponding MPI operations.
• Static assertions to check weather atomic operations on the underlying type are supported

Currently neither implemented nor specified:

• memory model information
• memory model traits
• handling of local accesses e.g. array.lbegin().load()

Mixing atomic and non-atomic accesses

As the constructor of dash::GlobRef<T> takes a DART gptr which is not strongly-typed, atomic accesses to non-atomic elements (and vice versa) are possible. In some cases this might be beneficial, as atomic operations are expensive compared to non-atomic ones. However between sections with non-atomic and atomic operations there has to be a barrier and a memory flush. Otherwise the behavior is undefined. Furthermore we do not recommend using this "hack" at all.

An example of this is dash::Shared which provides both non-atomic (shared.get()) and atomic (shared.atomic.get()) access.

Container Example:

dash::Array<dash::Atomic<int>> array(100);
// supported as Atomic<value_t>(value_t T) is available
dash::fill(array.begin(), array.end(), 0);

if(dash::myid() == 0){
  array[10].store(5);
  }
dash::barrier();
array[10].add(1);
// postcondition:
// array[10] == dash::size() + 5

The following does not work:

dash::Array<dash::Atomic<int>> array(100);
array.local[10].load();               // not allowed
dash::atomic::load(array.local[10]);  // not allowed
dash::atomic::load(array.lbegin());   // not allowed