Per-node multithreading and remote latency

Author

Thitikamol, Kritchalach ; Keleher, Peter

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput. Sci., Maryland Univ., College Park, MD, USA

Volume

47

Issue

4

fYear

1998

fDate

4/1/1998 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

414

Lastpage

426

Abstract

This paper evaluates the use of per-node multithreading to hide remote memory and synchronization latencies in software DSMs. As with hardware systems, multithreading in software systems can be used to reduce the costs of remote requests by running other threads when the current thread blocks. We added multithreading to the CVM software DSM and evaluated its impact on the performance of a suite of common shared memory programs. Multithreading resulted in speed improvements of at least 20 percent in two of the applications, and better than 15 percent for several other applications. However, we also found that good performance cannot always be achieved transparently for nontrivial applications. Also, the characteristics of the underlying DSM protocol can have a large effect on multithreading´s utility

Keywords

distributed memory systems; parallel architectures; shared memory systems; latencies; multithreading; per-node multithreading; protocol; remote memory; shared memory programs; software DSMs; Application software; Computer architecture; Costs; Delay; Hardware; Multithreading; Protocols; Software systems; Wire; Yarn;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Computers, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9340

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/12.675711

Filename

675711