Tempest and Typhoon: User-level Shared Memory

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Tempest and Typhoon: User-level Shared Memory (1994)

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by Steven K. Reinhardt , James R. Larus , David A. Wood

Venue:	In Proceedings of the 21st Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture
Citations:	308 - 27 self

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@INPROCEEDINGS{Reinhardt94tempestand,
    author = {Steven K. Reinhardt and James R. Larus and David A. Wood},
    title = {Tempest and Typhoon: User-level Shared Memory},
    booktitle = {In Proceedings of the 21st Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture},
    year = {1994},
    pages = {325--336}
}

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Abstract

Future parallel computers must efficiently execute not only hand-coded applications but also programs written in high-level, parallel programming languages. Today’s machines limit these programs to a single communication paradigm, either message-passing or shared-memory, which results in uneven performance. This paper addresses this problem by defining an interface, Tempest, that exposes low-level communication and memory-system mechanisms so programmers and compilers can customize policies for a given application. Typhoon is a proposed hardware platform that implements these mechanisms with a fully-programmable, user-level processor in the network interface. We demonstrate the utility of Tempest with two examples. First, the Stache protocol uses Tempest’s finegrain access control mechanisms to manage part of a processor’s local memory as a large, fully-associative cache for remote data. We simulated Typhoon on the Wisconsin Wind Tunnel and found that Stache running on Typhoon performs comparably (±30%) to an all-hardware Dir N NB cache-coherence protocol for five shared-memory programs. Second, we illustrate how programmers or compilers can use Tempest’s flexibility to exploit an application’s sharing patterns with a custom protocol. For the EM3D application, the custom protocol improves performance up to 35 % over the all-hardware protocol.

Keyphrases

user-level shared memory custom protocol hardware platform single communication paradigm all-hardware dir nb cache-coherence protocol today machine processor local memory future parallel computer remote data memory-system mechanism tempest finegrain access control low-level communication parallel programming language uneven performance wisconsin wind tunnel typhoon performs network interface user-level processor shared-memory program em3d application tempest flexibility fully-associative cache all-hardware protocol hand-coded application stache protocol