A HYBRID COHERENCE SCHEME FOR SOFTWARE DISTRIBUTED SHARED MEMORY

Abstract

Software distributed shared memory (DSM) provides a convenient and effective solution for programming parallel applications on distributed systems. However, the performance of current implementations suffers from large overhead in enforcing memory coherence. Coherence faults are the sources of massive network traffic. Various memory consistency models have been proposed in order to eliminate the effects of network traffic and memory latency. In this paper, we present a novel approach that combines relaxed memory consistency models and a compiler strategy to solve memory coherence problems for DSM. This approach produces fewer coherence faults. Experimental results also show this hybrid approach is effective for reducing the memory coherence overhead of DSM.