1. A method for implementing a spin lock in a system comprising a plurality of processing nodes, each node comprising at least one processor and a cache memory, the method comprising steps of: obtaining exclusivity to the cache memory; determining whether the spin lock is available; acquiring the spin lock upon determining that the spin lock is available; releasing the spin lock once processing is complete; and instructing cache coherent hardware in the system to mark the cache memory as non-exclusive in order to explicitly yield the exclusivity to the cache memory; wherein the instructing step is automatically executed after the releasing step.