An Effective Logical Cache for a Clustered LRC-Based DSM System

摘要

As local-area workstation networks are widely available, the idea of offering a software distributed shared memory (SDSM) system across interconnects of clusters is quite an attractive alternative for compute-intensive applications. However, the higher cost of sending a message over an inter-cluster link compared to an intra-cluster one can limit applications' performance on a multi-cluster SDSM system. In this paper, we present the extensions that we have added to the SDSM TreadMarks, which provides the lazy release consistency (LRC) memory model, in order to adapt it to a loosely-coupled cluster-based platform. We have implemented a logical- per-cluster cache that exploits cluster locality. By accessing the cache of its cluster, a processor can share data previously requested by a second processor of its cluster, thereby, minimizing, the cost of inter-cluster communication.