Reducing communication overhead and page faults in SDSM platforms

Abstract

In this paper we present a new dynamic, cache coherence protocol for Software Distributed Shared Memory (SDSM) systems that adopt the scope-consistency model[7]. We initially outline our basic protocol, called Reduced Message Protocol (RMP), and then propose two enhancements: the Multiple Home RMP (RMP-MH) and the Lock Migration RMP (RMP-LM). The experimentation we conducted with the proposed protocols, exhibits significant improvements by reducing two of the major latency factors in SDSM platforms: the total communication messages and the overall number of page faults. To demonstrate the efficiency and the effectiveness of the RMP protocols, we used SPLASH as well as synthetic application benchmarks. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.