Performance Implications of Communication Mechanisms in All-Software Global Address Space Systems

Global addressing of shared data simplifies parallel programming and complements message passing models commonly found in distributed memory machines. A number of programming systems have been designed that synthesize global addressing purely in software on such machines. These systems provide a number of communication mechanisms to mitigate the effect of high communication latencies and overheads. This study compares the mechanisms in two representative all-software systems: CRL and Split-C. CRL uses region-based caching while Split-C uses split-phase and push-based data transfers for optimizing communication performance. Both systems take advantage of bulk data transfers. By implementing a set of parallel applications in both CRL and Split-C, and running them on the IBM SP2, Meiko CS-2 and two simulated architectures, we find that split-phase and push-based bulk data transfers are essential for good performance. Regionbased caching benefits applications with irregular structure a...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: PPOPP
• Authors: Beng-Hong Lim, Chi-Chao Chang, Grzegorz Czajkowski, Thorsten von Eicken
• Keywords: Bulk Data Transfers, Communication Mechanisms, Data Transfers, Distributed And Parallel Computing, PPOPP 1997