Transparent adaptation of sharing granularity in MultiView‐based DSM systems

In this paper we propose a mechanism that provides distributed shared memory (DSM) systems with a flexible sharing granularity. The size of the shared memory units is dynamically determined by the system during runtime. This size can range from that of a single variable up to the size of the entire shared memory space. During runtime, the DSM transparently adapts the granularity to the memory access pattern of the application in each phase of its execution. This adaptation, called ComposedView, provides efficient data sharing in software DSM while preserving sequential consistency. Neither complex code analysis nor annotation by the programmer or the compiler are required. Our experiments indicate a substantial performance boost (up to 80% speed‐up improvement) when running a large set of applications using our method, compared to running these benchmark applications with the best fixed granularity. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

[1]  Alan L. Cox,et al.  Tradeoffs between false sharing and aggregation in software distributed shared memory , 1997, PPOPP '97.

[2]  Kai Li,et al.  IVY: A Shared Virtual Memory System for Parallel Computing , 1988, ICPP.

[3]  Mark D. Hill,et al.  Using prediction to accelerate coherence protocols , 1998, ISCA.

[4]  John K. Bennett,et al.  Efficient runtime support for cluster-based distributed shared memory multiprocessors , 1998 .

[5]  Assaf Schuster,et al.  MultiView and Millipage — fine-grain sharing in page-based DSMs , 1999, OSDI '99.

[6]  Ricardo Bianchini,et al.  Data prefetching for software DSMs , 1998, ICS '98.

[7]  Chin-Laung Lei,et al.  Data prefetching for distributed shared memory systems , 1996, Proceedings of HICSS-29: 29th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

[8]  Babak Falsafi,et al.  Memory sharing predictor: the key to a speculative coherent DSM , 1999, ISCA.

[9]  James R. Larus,et al.  Fine-grain access control for distributed shared memory , 1994, ASPLOS VI.

[10]  Liviu Iftode,et al.  Scope consistency: a bridge between release consistency and entry consistency , 1996, SPAA '96.

[11]  Per Stenström,et al.  Effectivness of Dynamic Prefetching in Multiple-Writer Distributed Virtual Shared-Memory Systems , 1997, J. Parallel Distributed Comput..

[12]  Michel Dubois,et al.  International Conference on Parallel Processing Fixed and Adaptive Sequential Prefetching in Shared Memory Multiprocessors , 2006 .

[13]  Alan L. Cox,et al.  Lazy release consistency for software distributed shared memory , 1992, ISCA '92.

[14]  Anoop Gupta,et al.  The SPLASH-2 programs: characterization and methodological considerations , 1995, ISCA.

[15]  Kourosh Gharachorloo,et al.  Shasta: a low overhead, software-only approach for supporting fine-grain shared memory , 1996, ASPLOS VII.

[16]  Charles L. Seitz,et al.  Myrinet: A Gigabit-per-Second Local Area Network , 1995, IEEE Micro.

[17]  Michael L. Scott,et al.  Comparative evaluation of fine- and coarse-grain approaches for software distributed shared memory , 1999, Proceedings Fifth International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture.

[18]  John B. Carter,et al.  Design of the Munin Distributed Shared Memory System , 1995, J. Parallel Distributed Comput..

[19]  Yuval Tamir,et al.  Hierarchical Coherency Management for Shared Virtual Memory Multicomputers , 1992, J. Parallel Distributed Comput..

[20]  A. Agarwal,et al.  MGS: A Multigrain Shared Memory System , 1996, 23rd Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA'96).

[21]  Leigh Stoller,et al.  Making distributed shared memory simple, yet efficient , 1998, Proceedings Third International Workshop on High-Level Parallel Programming Models and Supportive Environments.

[22]  Assaf Schuster,et al.  Dynamic adaptation of sharing granularity in DSM systems , 1999, Proceedings of the 1999 International Conference on Parallel Processing.

[23]  Daeyeon Park,et al.  Adaptive granularity: Transparent integration of fine- and coarse-grain communication , 1996, Proceedings of the 1996 Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Technique.