Pre-Fetching Tree-Structured Data in Distributed Memory

A distributed heap storage manager has been implemented on the Fujitsu AP1000 multicomputer. The performance of various pre-fetching strategies is experimentally compared. Subjective programming benefits and objective performance benefits of up to 10% in pre-fetching are found for certain applications, but not for all. The performance benefits of pre-fetching depend on the specific data structure and access patterns. We suggest that control of pre-fetching strategy be dynamically under the control of the application. 1 Introduction In many applications in parallel distributed computing a lot of programmer effort is expended in managing distributed and shared data structures. In many cases the structures are essential to the correct functioning of the program, but their performance is not critical to the overall program performance. Programming the data sharing is often a distraction from the primary skills of the programmer, and the central algorithm, which may be in visualisation and..