A system and method can support buffer allocation in a shared memory queue. The shared memory queue can be associated with a shared memory, to which one or more communication peers are attached. One or more processes can travel through a plurality of memory blocks in the shared memory, and can allocate one or more message buffers in the shared memory mutual exclusively. The allocated message buffers can be used to contain one or more messages for the one or more communication peers. Furthermore, a said process can allocate the message buffers based on an atomic operation on the memory block at the instruction level.