Scalable Speculative Parallelization on Commodity Clusters

While clusters of commodity servers and switches are the most popular form of large-scale parallel computers, many programs are not easily parallelized for execution upon them. In particular, high inter-node communication cost and lack of globally shared memory appear to make clusters suitable only for server applications with abundant task-level parallelism and scientific applications with regular and independent units of work. Clever use of pipeline parallelism (DSWP), thread-level speculation (TLS), and speculative pipeline parallelism (Spec-DSWP) can mitigate the costs of inter-thread communication on shared memory multicore machines. This paper presents Distributed Software Multi-threaded Transactional memory (DSMTX), a runtime system which makes these techniques applicable to non-shared memory clusters, allowing them to efficiently address inter-node communication costs. Initial results suggest that DSMTX enables efficient cluster execution of a wider set of application types. F...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: MICRO
• Authors: Hanjun Kim, Arun Raman, Feng Liu, Jae W. Lee, David I. August
• Keywords: Hardware, MICRO 2010, Pipeline Parallelism, Shared Memory, Transactional Memory