Multi-Threaded Design for a Software Distributed Shared Memory System

摘要

This paper describes the design and implemen- tation of a multi-threaded Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) system, called Cohesion, which provides high programming flex- ibility and latency masking, and supports load balancing. Co- hesion offers a parallel programming environment which is very similar to that on a multiprocessors system. Threads could be created recursively in this environment, and users are not re- quired to handle the locations of the threads. Instead of support- ing a shared variable model, Cohesion provides a global shared address space among all nodes in the system. The space is fur- ther divided into three regions, i.e., release, conventional, and object-based memory, each is applied with different consistency protocol. In this paper, the design issues in an ordinary thread system, such as thread management, load balancing, and syn- chronization, have been reconsidered with the memory manage- ment provided by the DMN system. Several real applications have been used to evaluate the performance of the system. The results show that multi-threading usually has better performance than single-threading because the network latency can be masked by overlapping communication and computation. However, the gain depends on program behavior and the number of threads executed on each node in the svstem.