Title:
Distributed Shared Abstractions (DSA) on Multiprocessors
Distributed Shared Abstractions (DSA) on Multiprocessors
Author(s)
Clemencon, Christian
Mukherjee, Bodhisattwa
Schwan, Karsten
Mukherjee, Bodhisattwa
Schwan, Karsten
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Abstract
Any parallel program has abstractions that are shared by
the program's multiple processes, including data structures containing
shared data, code implementing operations like global sums or minima,
type instances used for process synchronization or communication, etc.
Such shared abstractions can considerably affect the performance of
parallel programs, on both distributed and shared memory multiprocessors.
As a result, their implementation must be efficient, and such efficiency
should be achieved without unduly compromising program portability
and maintainability. Unfortunately, efficiency and portability can be at
cross-purposes, since high performance typically requires changes in
the representation of shared abstractions across different parallel
machines.
The primary contribution of the DSA library presented and evaluated in this
paper is its representation of shared abstractions as objects that may be
internally distributed across different nodes of a parallel machine. Such
distributed shared abstractions (DSA) are encapsulated so that their
implementations are easily changed while maintaining program portability
across parallel architectures ranging from small-scale multiprocessors,
to medium-scale shared and distributed memory machines, and potentially,
to networks of computer workstations. The principal results presented in
this paper are (1) a demonstration that the fragmentation of object state
across different nodes of a multiprocessor machine can significantly improve
program performance and (2) that such object fragmentation can be achieved
without compromising portability by changing object interfaces. These results
are demonstrated using implementations of the DSA library
on several medium-scale multiprocessors, including the BBN Butterfly,
Kendall Square Research, and SGI shared memory multiprocessors.
The DSA library's evaluation uses synthetic workloads and
a parallel implementation of a branch-and-bound algorithm for solving
the Traveling Salesperson Problem (TSP).
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Date Issued
1993
Extent
416415 bytes
Resource Type
Text
Resource Subtype
Technical Report