Effectiveness of Dynamic Prefetching in Multiple-Writer Distributed Virtual Shared-Memory Systems

Magnus Karlsson, Per Stenström
1997 Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing  
We consider a network of workstations (NOW) organization consisting of busbased multiprocessors interconnected by an ATM interconnect on which a sharedmemory programming model is imposed by using a multiple-writer distributed virtual shared memory system. The latencies associated with bringing data into the local memory are a severe performance limitation of such systems. To tolerate the access latencies, we propose a novel prefetch approach and show how it can be integrated into the
more » ... sed coherence layer of a multiple-writer protocol. This approach uses the access history of each page to guide which pages to prefetch. Based on detailed architectural simulations and seven scientific applications we find that our prefetch algorithm can remove a vast majority of the remote operations which improves the performance of all applications. We also find that the bandwidth provided by ATM switches available today is sufficient to accommodate prefetching. However, the protocol processing overhead of available ATM interfaces limits the gain of the prefetching algorithms.
doi:10.1006/jpdc.1997.1333 fatcat:e736a5vfczdilhzjbbnjlrva3a