Atomic Semantics is a term which describes the guarantees provided by a data register shared by several processors in a parallel machine or in a network of computers working together.
Atomic semantics are defined for a variable with a single writer but multiple readers. These semantics are very strong: they guarantee that the read and write operations to the variable behave exactly as if they happened instantaneously in some point in time which is within the actual time where the operation took place.
Famous quotes containing the word atomic:
“The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)