Atomic Read Modify Write Primitives for I/O Devices

New I/O usage models have emerged recently. There is a trend towards offloading compute intensive applications to specialized engines/accelerators. Many such applications today are in the high performance computing domain, examples of such are financial options modeling, seismic exploration, game physics, and bio-informatics. This paper illustrates the need for synchronization primitives for I/O accelerators to help these emerging usage models. It shows examples from real-world applications and the associated performance benefits of such primitives.