Abstract

A software distributed shared memory (DSM) system allows shared memory parallel programs to execute on networks of workstations. This thesis presents a new class of protocols that has lower communication requirements than previous DSM protocols, and can consequently achieve higher performance. The lazy release consistent protocols achieve this reduction in communication by piggybacking consistency information on top of existing synchronization transfers. Some of the protocols also improve performance by speculatively moving data. We evaluate the impact of these features by comparing the performance of a software DSM using lazy protocols with that of a DSM using previous eager protocols. We found that seven of our eight applications performed better on the lazy system, and four of the applications showed performance speedups of at least 18%. As part of this comparison, we show that the cost of executing the slightly more complex code of the lazy protocols is far less important than the ...

Citations