Workform Processing: A New Paradigm for Fault-Tolerant Distributed Parallel Computation.

摘要

This project explored the workform model of parallel processing, looking at its implications for parallel architectures, operating systems and parallel application structuring. The architecture investigation lead to the design and construction of a scalable shared memory multiprocessor, ParaDiGM, that included as novel features: large cache lines, software-controlled caches, locking and messaging support in the caches and hierarchically shared caches. Various detailed studies coming from this work has shown that these features provide major improvements in cost-effective scalability for parallel computation, particularly parallel simulations. The work on parallel operating system support lead to two major innovations, application-controlled page caches and memory-based messaging. The former allows an application to completely control the allocation of physical memory allocated to it, avoiding unexpected page faults. The latter provides application-level access to the hardware-supported memory-based messaging as well as providing an extended abstraction of this facility.