Experience with Fine-Grain Synchronization in MIMD Machines for Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient

This paper discusses our experience with fine-grain synchronization for a variant of the preconditioned conjugate gradient method. This algorithm represents a large class of algorithms that have been widely used but traditionally difficult to implement efficiently on vector and parallel machines. Through a series of experiments conducted using a simulator of a distributed shared-memory multiprocessor, this paper addresses two major questions related to finegrain synchronization in the context of this application. First, what is the overall impact of fine-grain synchronization on performance? Second, what are the individual contributions of the following three mechanisms typically provided to support fine-grain synchronization: language-level support, full-empty bits for compact storage and communication ofsynchronization state,and efficientprocessor operations on the state bits? Our experiments indicate that fine-grain synchronization improves overall performanceby a factorof ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1993
• Where: PPOPP
• Authors: Donald Yeung, Anant Agarwal
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, PPOPP 1993, Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient Method, Smaller Fraction, fine-grain Synchronization