Adding memory resource consideration into workload distribution for software DSM systems

Workload distribution is an important issue for user applications to obtain a good performance on software distributed shared memory (DSM) systems. The workload distribution methods that were previously proposed for DSM systems always considered only CPU power and data sharing but ignored memory availability of processors. However, the cost of memory accesses is also an important factor of determining program performance especially when processors have not sufficient memory space to cache all the data needed by program threads. Therefore, the past methods might make wrong decisions in workload distribution to degrade program performance. To resolve this problem, this paper is dedicated to adding memory resource consideration into workload distribution for software DSM systems. Our experimental result shows that one workload distribution method with memory resource consideration is indeed more effective for minimizing the execution time of DSM applications than another without memory resource consideration.