Techniques for reducing consistency-related communication in distributed shared-memory systems

摘要: Distributed shared memory (DSM) is an abstraction of on a distributed-memory machine. Hardware DSM systems support this at the architecture level; software within runtime system. One key problems in building efficient system to reduce amount communication needed keep distributed memories consistent. In article we present four techniques for doing so: release consistency; multiple consistency protocols; write-shared and update-with-timeout mechanism. These have been implemented Munin We compare performance seven application programs: first their when using message passing, then running conventional that does not embody preceding techniques. On 16-processor cluster workstations, Munin's 5% passing out applications. For other three, 29 33%. Detailed analysis two these three applications indicates addition function-shipping capability would bring 7% message-passing performance. Compared system, achieves improvements ranging from few several hundred percent, depending application.