An Asynchronous Protocol for Release Consistent Distributed Shared Memory Systems

Abstract

Distributed shared memory (DSM) systems[1] provide a simple programming paradigm for networks of workstations, which are gaining popularity due to their cost-effective high computing power. However, DSM systems usually exhibit poor performance due to the large communication delay between the nodes. A lot of different memory consistency models have been proposed to mask the delay due to network communication. In this paper, we propose an asynchronous protocol for the release consistent memory model, which we call Asynchronous Release Consistency (ARC) protocol. In ARC, the network delay is reduced by proper prefetching of pages and two network interfaces are used to perform the prefetching of pages asynchronously with the other synchronization operations. We have compared the performance of the proposed protocol with the lazy invalidate protocol by running standard benchmark programs and we found that ARC achieves up to 29% performance improvement. 1 Introduction Software distributed ..