Home-based SVM Protocols for SMP Clusters: Design, Implementation and Performance
Report ID: TR-548-97Author: Samanta, Rudrajit / Iftode, Liviu / Singh, Jaswinder Pal
Date: 1997-05-00
Pages: 7
Download Formats: |Postscript|
Abstract:
Shared virtual memory has been used as a cost-effective means of providing the attractive shared-memory model to programmers. In the past, most SVM implementations have been focussed on clusters of uniprocessor systems. Due to the increasing popularity and declining costs of small scale shared memory multiprocessor systems (SMPs), they have become attractive candidates for replacing the uniprocessor nodes when building a shared virtual memory layer. At present, there is no definite answer on what is the best approach to implementing an SVM layer for a cluster of SMPs, whether such a protocol is necessarily different from one designed for uniprocessor nodes, and what accepts of this difference actually results in increases in performance. To answer these questions and explore the design space of SVM on SMPs, we have implemented a home-based lazy release consistency (HLRC) protocol on a cluster of 4-way Intel PentiumPro SMPs interconnected with Myrinet. This paper presents numerous protocol design options we were faced with and their implications. We are able to achieve very promising performance on some applications investigated so far. We have investigated (quantitatively) the tradeoffs in our system to validate some of the choices we have made. The tradeoff investigation is ongoing, and we will complete it for the final paper.