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barrier

A synchronization point that makes parallel work wait until everyone reaches it or memory is consistent.

A barrier forces concurrent tasks to line up: no one proceeds past it until the required participants have arrived or the required memory writes are visible. On a GPU, barriers order operations among shader invocations and ensure earlier memory writes are seen before later reads. Without them, parallel code races and reads stale or incomplete data.

See also

  • acquire / releaseThe two paired steps of taking and giving back a lock, with memory-ordering guarantees.
  • atomicAn operation that happens all at once, with no chance for another thread to interrupt it midway.
  • access chainA shader instruction that computes a pointer to a specific piece inside a larger data structure.

Referenced by

2D array · access chain · acquire / release · adjacency · apiVersion · bitmap text