Three slightly different answers depending how you look at the question:
1) Good enough for the exact question asked is Jonathan Leffler's solution, except that to round up to 16-aligned, you only need 15 extra bytes, not 16.
A:
/* allocate a buffer with room to add 0-15 bytes to ensure 16-alignment */
void *mem = malloc(1024+15);
ASSERT(mem); // some kind of error-handling code
/* round up to multiple of 16: add 15 and then round down by masking */
void *ptr = ((char*)mem+15) & ~ (size_t)0x0F;
B:
free(mem);
2) For a more generic memory allocation function, the caller doesn't want to have to keep track of two pointers (one to use and one to free). So you store a pointer to the 'real' buffer below the aligned buffer.
A:
void *mem = malloc(1024+15+sizeof(void*));
if (!mem) return mem;
void *ptr = ((char*)mem+sizeof(void*)+15) & ~ (size_t)0x0F;
((void**)ptr)[-1] = mem;
return ptr;
B:
if (ptr) free(((void**)ptr)[-1]);
Note that unlike (1), where only 15 bytes were added to mem, this code could actually reduce the alignment if your implementation happens to guarantee 32-byte alignment from malloc (unlikely, but in theory a C implementation could have a 32-byte aligned type). That doesn't matter if all you do is call memset_16aligned, but if you use the memory for a struct then it could matter.
I'm not sure off-hand what a good fix is for this (other than to warn the user that the buffer returned is not necessarily suitable for arbitrary structs) since there's no way to determine programatically what the implementation-specific alignment guarantee is. I guess at startup you could allocate two or more 1-byte buffers, and assume that the worst alignment you see is the guaranteed alignment. If you're wrong, you waste memory. Anyone with a better idea, please say so...
[Added:
The 'standard' trick is to create a union of 'likely to be maximally aligned types' to determine the requisite alignment. The maximally aligned types are likely to be (in C99) 'long long', 'long double', 'void *', or 'void (*)(void)'; if you include <stdint.h>, you could presumably use 'intmax_t' in place of long long (and, on Power 6 (AIX) machines, intmax_t would give you a 128-bit integer type). The alignment requirements for that union can be determined by embedding it into a struct with a single char followed by the union:
struct alignment
{
char c;
union
{
intmax_t imax;
long double ldbl;
void *vptr;
void (*fptr)(void);
} u;
} align_data;
size_t align = (char *)&align_data.u.imax - &align_data.c;
You would then use the larger of the requested alignment (in the example, 16) and the align value calculated above.
On (64-bit) Solaris 10, it appears that the basic alignment for the result from malloc() is a multiple of 32 bytes.
]
In practice, aligned allocators often take a parameter for the alignment rather than it being hardwired. So the user will pass in the size of the struct they care about (or the least power of 2 greater than or equal to that) and all will be well.
3) Use what your platform provides: posix_memalign for POSIX, _aligned_malloc on Windows.
4) If you use C11, then the cleanest - portable and concise - option is to use the standard library function aligned_alloc that was introduced in this version of the language specification.
