An Asynchronous Protocol for Release Consistent Distributed Shared Memory Systems

Distributed shared memory (DSM) systems provide a simple programming paradigm for networks of workstations, which are gaining popularity due to their cost-effective high computing power. However, DSM systems usually exhibit poor performance due to the large communication delay between the nodes; and a lot of different memory consistency models have been proposed to mask the network delay. In this paper, we propose an asynchronous protocol for the release consistent memory model, which we call an Asynchronous Release Consistency (ARC) protocol. Unlike other protocols where the communication adheres to the synchronous request/receive paradigm, the ARC protocol is asynchronous, such that the necessary pages are broadcast before they are requested. Hence, the network delay can be reduced by proper prefetching of necessary pages. We have also compared the performance of the ARC protocol with the lazy release protocol by running standard benchmark programs; and the experimental results showed that the ARC protocol achieves a performance improvement of up to 29%.

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