Application-Specific Protocols for User-Level Shared Memory
Report ID: TR-464-94Author: Falsafi, Babak / Lebeck, Alvin / Reinhardt, Steven / Hill, Mark D. / Larus, James R. / Rogers, Anne / Schoinas, Ioannis / Wood, David A.
Date: 1994-08-00
Pages: 10
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Abstract:
Recent distributed shared memory (DSM) systems and proposed shared-memory machines have implemented some or all of their cache coherence protocols in software. One way to exploit the flexibility of this software is to tailor a coherence protocol to match an application's communication patterns and memory semantics. This paper presents evidence that this approach can lead to large performance improvements. It shows that application-specific protocols substantially improved the performance of three application programs--appbt, em3d, and barnes--over carefully tuned transparent shared memory implementations. The speed-ups were obtained on Blizzard, a fine-grained DSM system running on a 32-node Thinking Machines CM-5.