View Caching: efficient software shared memory for dynamic computations

V. Karamcheti, A.A. Chien
Proceedings 11th International Parallel Processing Symposium  
Software distributed shared memory (DSM) techniques, while effective on applications with coarse-grained sharing, yield poor performance for the fine-grained sharing encountered in applications increasingly relying on sophisticated adaptive and hierarchical algorithms. Such applications exhibit irregular communication patterns unsynchronized with computation, incurring large overheads for synchronous (request-reply) DSM protocols that require responsive processing of coherence messages. We
more » ... ibe a new DSM framework, View Caching, that addresses this problem by utilizing application knowledge of data access semantics to enable the construction of low-overhead, asynchronous coherence protocols. Experiments on the Cray T3D show that view caching enables efficient execution of fine-grained irregular applications, reducing both coherence overheads and idle time to improve performance by up to 35% over a weakly-consistent DSM implementation. Concurrent Programming. MIT Press, 1987.
doi:10.1109/ipps.1997.580944 dblp:conf/ipps/KaramchetiC97 fatcat:lren4karijfzjb23ilesbacgta