Region-Based Prefetch Techniques for Software Distributed Shared Memory Systems

Although shared memory programming models show good programmability compared to message passing programming models, their implementation by page-based software distributed shared memory systems usually suffers from high memory consistency costs. The major part of these costs is internode data transfer for keeping virtual shared memory consistent. A good prefetch strategy can reduce this cost. We develop two prefetch techniques, TReP and HReP, which are based on the execution history of each parallel region. These techniques are evaluated using offline simulations with the NAS Parallel Benchmarks and the LINPACK benchmark. On average, TReP achieves an efficiency (ratio of pages prefetched that were subsequently accessed) of 96% and a coverage (ratio of access faults avoided by prefetches) of 65%. HReP achieves an efficiency of 91% but has a coverage of 79%. Treating the cost of an incorrectly prefetched page to be equivalent to that of a miss, these techniques have an effective page mis...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: CCGRID
• Authors: Jie Cai, Peter E. Strazdins, Alistair P. Rendell
• Keywords: CCGRID 2010, Distributed And Parallel Computing, Distributed Shared Memory, Page Miss Rate, Shared Memory