Techniques to Improve the Performance of Software-Based Distributed Shared Memory Systems

Abstract

Software distributed shared-memory systems are able to provide programmers with the illusion of global shared memory on networked workstations without special hardware support. This thesis identifies two problems with such systems: (1) poor application programming interfaces (APIs) for programmers who need to solve complicated synchronization problems, and (2) inefficiencies in traditional multiple writer protocols. The author proposes a solution to both of these problems: the introduction of user-definable, high-level synchronization primitives to provide a better API, and the single-owner protocol to provide efficiency. To accommodate user-definable high-level synchronization primitives, a variant of release consistency also is proposed. User-definable, high-level synchronization primitives provide a paradigm for users to define their own synchronization primitives instead of relying on traditional low-level synchronization primitives, such as barriers and locks. The single-owner protocol reduces the number of messages from OMICRON (n (exp2)) messages (the number of messages needed in the multiple-owner protocol) to THETA (n) messages when there are first n writers writing to a page and then n readers reading the page. Unlike some multiple-owner protocols, in the single-owner protocol garbage collection is performed asynchronously, and the size of a message for doing memory update is smaller in most cases. The author also evaluates the tradeoffs between the single-owner protocol and multiple-owner protocols. He has found that in most cases the single-owner protocol uses fewer messages than multiple-owner protocols, but there are some computations that may perform better with some multiple-owner protocols. To combine the advantages of both protocols, he proposes a hybrid owner protocol that can be used to increase the efficiency in an adaptive way, with some pages managed by the single-owner protocol and some by a multiple-owner protocol.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Aug 01, 1998
Accession Number
ADA440326

Entities

People

  • Churngwei Chu

Organizations

  • New York University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Algorithms
  • Application Programming Interface
  • Computations
  • Computer Programming
  • Computer Science
  • Computers
  • Computing System Architectures
  • Detection
  • Distributed Computing
  • Heat Energy
  • Heat Transmission
  • High Performance Computing
  • Operating Systems
  • Parallel Computing
  • Parallel Processing
  • Steady State
  • Two Dimensional

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Computer Networking
  • Parallel and Distributed Computing.