CAS-DSM: A Compiler Assisted Software Distributed Shared Memory

Manoj, NP and Manjunath, KV and Govindarajan, R (2004) CAS-DSM: A Compiler Assisted Software Distributed Shared Memory. In: International Journal of Parallel Programming, 32 (2). pp. 77-122.

PDF 22.pdf - Published Version Restricted to Registered users only Download (520kB) | Request a copy

Abstract

Traditional software Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) systems rely on the virtual memory management mechanisms to detect accesses to shared memory locations and maintain their consistency. The resulting involvement of the OS(kernel) and the associated overhead which is significant, can be avoided by careful compile time analysis and code instrumentation. In this paper, we propose such a Compiler Assisted Software support approach (CAS-DSM). In the CAS-DSM implementation, the involvement of the OS kernel is avoided by instrumenting the application code at the source level. The overhead caused by the execution of the instrumented code is reduced through several aggressive compile time optimizations. Finally, we also address the issue of reducing certain overheads in polling-based implementation of receiving asynchronous messages. We used SUIF, a public domain compiler tool, to implement compiletime analysis, instrumentation and optimizations. We modified CVM, a publiclyavailable software DSM to support the instrumentation inserted by the compiler.Detailed performance evaluation of CAS-DSM is reported using a set ofSplash/Splash2 parallel application benchmarks on a distributed memory IBMSP-2 machine. CAS-DSM achieved moderate to good performance improvementsfor most of the applications compared to the original CVM implementation.Reducing the overheads in polling-based implementation improves the performance of CAS-DSM significantly resulting in an overall improvement of 12–52% over the original CVM implementation.

Item Type:	Journal Article
Publication:	International Journal of Parallel Programming
Publisher:	Plenum Publishing Corporation
Additional Information:	copyright of this article belongs to Plenum Publishing Corporation.
Keywords:	Coherent Virtual Machine (CVM);software distributed shared memory;Stanford University Intermediate Form (SUIF); performance evaluation.
Department/Centre:	Division of Interdisciplinary Sciences > Supercomputer Education & Research Centre Division of Electrical Sciences > Computer Science & Automation
Date Deposited:	10 Dec 2008 07:24
Last Modified:	19 Sep 2010 04:53
URI:	http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/16687

Actions (login required)

View Item