The design and implementation of cc-COMA as a platform for distributed-memory machines

摘要

"Compiler-controlled cache only memory architecture (cc-COMA)" is proposed as a framework to develop fully-automatic parallelizing compilers for distributed-memory machines. A cc-COMA system consists of the runtime system to realize virtually shared memory like a COMA machine on the distributed memory like a COMA machine on the distributed memory and the compiler which generates object code along with the embedded primitives to maintain the cache coherency. This paper presents an experimental implementation of a cc-COMA runtime environment named "Laurasia". laurasia realizes the software-controlled COMA runtime environment on networks of workstations (NOWs) along with the compiler inteface to maintain co-herency among the nodes. The experimental result shows that the performance of parallel programs can be dramatically improved by the embedded code inserted by the compiler that controls the cache coherency.