Application-specific protocols for user-level shared memory

Author

Falsafi, Babak ; Lebeck, Alvin R. ; Reinhardt, Steven K. ; Schoinas, Ioannis ; Hill, Mark D. ; Larus, J.R. ; Rogers, Anne ; Wood, David A.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput. Sci., Wisconsin Univ., Madison, WI, USA

fYear

1994

fDate

14-18 Nov 1994

Firstpage

380

Lastpage

389

Abstract

Recent distributed shared memory (DSM) systems and proposed shared-memory machines have implemented some or all of their cache coherence protocols in software. One way to exploit the flexibility of this software is to tailor a coherence protocol to match an application´s communication patterns and memory semantics. This paper presents evidence that this approach can lead to large performance improvements. It shows that application-specific protocols substantially improved the performance of three application programs-appbt, em3d, and barnes-over carefully tuned transparent shared memory implementations. The speed-ups were obtained on Blizzard, a fine-grained DSM system running on a 32-node Thinking Machines CM-5

Keywords

access protocols; cache storage; coherence; shared memory systems; software performance evaluation; Blizzard; Thinking Machines CM-5; appbt; application programs; application-specific protocols; barnes; cache coherence protocols; communication patterns; distributed shared memory systems; em3d; fine-grained system; memory semantics; performance improvements; shared-memory machines; speedups; tuned transparent shared memory implementations; user-level shared memory; Access protocols; Computational modeling; Concurrent computing; Distributed computing; Hardware; Parallel languages; Pattern matching; Program processors; Protection; Sun;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Supercomputing '94., Proceedings

Conference_Location

Washington, DC

Print_ISBN

0-8186-6605-6

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/SUPERC.1994.344301

Filename

344301