An SDN based CBT for distributed shared memory

Abstract

It is a challenging task to provide an easy–to-use programming interface for distributed shared memory in parallel computing that demands high availability as well as effective synchronization. The current implementations typically use conventional Ethernet as communication medium using broadcast or multicast for synchronization mechanisms. In general, multicast is more efficient than broadcast, as it uses multicast tree to transfer data instead of multicast flooding. Multicast avoids redundant transmissions and lessens network contention. These properties make it significant for distributed shared memory. However, such solution has limited control on response time and process scheduling. This causes uncertainty of time spent in synchronization and interruption of unrelated processes in the same multicast group. In this research, we propose a dynamic SDN multicast mechanism to improve efficiency of synchronization for distributed shared memory by using an SDN-based multicast mechanism and a dynamic core based tree algorithm. The forwarding rule reduces the number of consistency-related messages without interfering the unrelated processes in the same multicast group. The dynamic core-based tree algorithm builds a multicast tree for every multicast group, hereby, SDN controller dynamically adjusts multicast tree according to joining or leaving of nodes. The experiments on the prototype system demonstrate that it could provide better performance compared to the conventional Ethernet based solution in terms of response time and process scheduling in the homogeneous testing environment.