Supporting software distributed shared memory with an optimizing compiler

To execute a shared memory program efficiently, we have to manage memory consistency with low overheads, and have to utilize communication bandwidth of the platform as much as possible. A software distributed shared memory (DSM) can solve these problems via proper support by an optimizing compiler. The optimizing compiler can detect shared write operations, using interprocedural points-to analysis. It also coalesces shared write commitments onto contiguous regions, and removes redundant write commitments, using interprocedural redundancy elimination. A page based target software DSM system can utilize communication bandwidth, owing to coalescing optimization. We have implemented the above optimizing compiler and a run time software DSM on AP1000+. We have obtained a high speed-up ratio with the SPLASH-2 benchmark suite. The result shows that using an optimizing compiler to assist a software DSM is a promising approach to obtain a good performance. It also shows that the appropriate protocol selection at a write commitment is an effective optimization