Atomic operations for fabric shared memories

A system includes a plurality of processes, a network fabric, and a shared memory accessible by the plurality of processes over the network fabric, the shared memory to store a plurality of elements of a data structure. A first process is designated as being allowed to update a target variable stored in the shared memory, and a second process of the plurality of processes writes a request for an atomic operation to a first region in the shared memory. The first process is responsive to the request to perform the atomic operation that updates the target variable, and write a result including a value of the updated target variable to a second region in the shared memory, the second region readable by the second process, the request and the result being elements of the data structure.