Evaluation of Release Consistent Software Distributed Shared Memory on Emerging Network Technology

We evaluate the e ect of processor speed, network bandwidth, and software overhead on the performance of release-consistent software distributed shared memory. We examine ve di erent protocols for implementing release consistency: eager update, eager invalidate, lazy update, lazy invalidate, and a new protocol called lazy hybrid. This lazy hybrid protocol tries to combine the bene ts of both lazy update and lazy invalidate. Our simulationsindicatethat withthe processors and networks that are becoming available, coarse-grained applications, such as Jacobi and TSP perform well, moreor less independent ofthe protocol used. Mediumgrained applications, such as Water, can achieve good performance, but the choice of protocol is critical. For sixteen processors, the best protocol, lazy hybrid, performed more than three times better than the worst, the eager update. Fine-grained applications such as Cholesky achieve little speedup regardless of the protocol because of the frequency of synchron...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1993
• Where: ISCA
• Authors: Sandhya Dwarkadas, Peter J. Keleher, Alan L. Cox, Willy Zwaenepoel
• Keywords: Hardware, ISCA 1993, Lazy Hybrid, Lazy Invalidate, Lazy Update