Title:
A Comparative Study of Distributed Shared Memory System Design Issues
A Comparative Study of Distributed Shared Memory System Design Issues
Author(s)
Mohindra, Ajay
Ramachandran, Umakishore
Ramachandran, Umakishore
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Abstract
In this research the various issues that arise in the design
and implementation of distributed shared memory (DSM) systems
are examined. This work has been motivated by two observations:
distributed systems will continue to become popular, and will be
increasingly used for solving large computational problems;
and shared memory paradigm is attractive for programming large
distributed systems because it offers a natural transition for
a programmer from the world of uniprocessors. The goal of this
work is to identify a set of system issues in applying the
shared memory paradigm to a distributed system, and evaluate the
effects of the ensuing design alternatives on the performance
of DSM systems. The design alternatives have been evaluated
in two steps. First, we undertake a detailed measurement-based
study of a distributed shared memory implementation on the Clouds
distributed operating system towards understanding the
system issues. Second, a simulation-based approach is used to
evaluate the system issues. A new workload model that
captures the salient features of parallel and distributed
programs is developed and used to drive the simulator.
The key results of the research are that the choice of the memory
model and coherence protocol does not significantly influence
the system performance for applications exhibiting high
computation granularity and low state-sharing; weaker memory
models become significant for large-scale DSM systems; the unit
of coherence maintenance depends on a set of parameters including
the overheads for servicing data requests as well as the speed
of data transmission on the network; and the design of
miscellaneous system services (such as synchronization and
data servers) can play an important role in the performance of
DSM systems.
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Date Issued
1994
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394209 bytes
Resource Type
Text
Resource Subtype
Technical Report