The quest for greater computational power is never-ending. Recently, the architectural trend has shifted from improving single-threaded application performance to improving multi-threaded application performance. Thus, multi-core processors have been increasingly popular. To achieve concurrent execution of threads on multi-core processors, applications must be explicitly restructured to exploit parallelism, either by programmers or compilers. However, conventional parallel programming models may introduce overhead due to synchronization and communications among threads in multi-threaded...