Article

Free access

Message-driven relaxed consistency in a software distributed shared memory

Authors:

Robert J. Fowler,

Eric JulAuthors Info & Claims

OSDI '94: Proceedings of the 1st USENIX conference on Operating Systems Design and Implementation

Pages 7 - es

Published: 14 November 1994 Publication History

PDF eReader Publisher Site

Abstract

Message-passing and distributed shared memory have their respective advantages and disadvantages in distributed parallel programming. We approach the problem of integrating both mechanisms into a single system by proposing a new message-driven coherency mechanism. Messages carrying explicit causality annotations are exchanged to trigger memory coherency actions. By adding annotations to standard message-based protocols, it is easy to construct efficient implementations of common synchronization and communication mechanisms. Because these are user-level messages, the set of available primitives is extended easily with language-or application-specific mechanisms. CarlOS, an experimental prototype for evaluating this approach, is derived from the lazy release consistent memory of TreadMarks. We describe the message-driven coherency memory model used in CarlOS, and we examine the performance of several applications.

References

[1]

{1} Sarita V. Adve and Mark D. Hill. A unified formalization of four shared-memory models. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 4(6):613-624, June 1993.]]

Digital Library

[2]

{2} John B. Carter. Efficient distributed shared memory based on multi-protocol release consistency. Ph.D. thesis, Rice University, September 1993.]]

Digital Library

[3]

{3} John B. Carter, John K. Bennett, and Willy Zwaenepoel. Techniques for reducing consistency-related communication in distributed shared memory systems. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems. To appear.]]

Digital Library

[4]

{4} Jeffrey S. Chase, Franz G. Amador, Edward D. Lazowska, Henry M. Levy, and Richard J. Littlefield. The Amber system: Parallel programming on a network of multiprocessors. In Proceedings of the 12th ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles, pages 147-158, December 1989.]]

Digital Library

[5]

{5} Digital. Alpha architecture handbook. Digital Press, 1992.]]

[6]

{6} M. Dubois, C. Scheurich, and F.A. Briggs. Memory access buffering in multiprocessors. In Proceedings of the 13th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture, pages 434-442, May 1986.]]

Digital Library

[7]

{7} Sandhay Dwarkadas, Pete Keleher, Alan L. Cox, and Willy Zwaenepoel. Evaluation of release consistent software distributed shared memory on emerging network technology. In Proceedings of the 20th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture, pages 244-255, May 1993.]]

Digital Library

[8]

{8} Kourosh Gharachorloo, Daniel Lenoski, James Laudon, Phillip Gibbons, Anoop Gupta, and John Hennessy. Memory consistency and event ordering in scalable shared-memory multiprocessors. In Proceedings of the 17th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture, pages 15-26, May 1990.]]

Digital Library

[9]

{9} A. Gupta, J. Hennessy, K. Gharachorloo, T. Mowry, and W.-D. Weber. Comparative evaluation of latency reducing and tolerating techniques. In Proceedings of the 18th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture, pages 254-263, May 1991.]]

Digital Library

[10]

{10} E. Jul, H. Levy, N. Hutchinson, and A. Black. Fine-grained mobility in the Emerald system. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 6(1):109-133, February 1988.]]

Digital Library

[11]

{11} Peter Keleher, Alan L. Cox, Sandhya Dwarkadas, and Willy Zwaenepoel. TreadMarks: Distributed shared memory on standard workstations and operating systems. In Proceedings of the 1994 Winter USENIX Conference, pages 115-132, January 1994.]]

Digital Library

[12]

{12} Peter Keleher, Alan L. Cox, and Willy Zwaenepoel. Lazy release consistency for software distributed shared memory. In Proceedings of the 19th International Symposiumon Computer Architecture, pages 13-21, May 1992.]]

Digital Library

[13]

{13} D. Kranz, K. Johnson, A. Agarwal, J. Kubiatowicz, and B-H. Lim. Integrating message-passing and shared-memory: Early experience. In Proceedings of the Fourth ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming, pages 54-63, San Diego, May 1993.]]

Digital Library

[14]

{14} John Kubiatowicz and Anant Agarwal. Anatomy of a message in the Alewife multiprocessor. In Proceedings of the 1993 ACM International Conference on Supercomputing , pages 195-206, July 1993.]]

Digital Library

[15]

{15} Jeffrey Kuskin, David Ofelt, Mark Heinrich, John Heinlein, Richard Simoni, Kourosh Gharachorloo, John Chapin, David Nakahira, Joel Baxter, Mark Horowitz, Anoop Gupta, Mendel Rosenbaum, and John Hennessy. The Stanford FLASH multiprocessor. In Proceedings of the 21st Annual International Conference on Computer Architecture, pages 302-313, April 1994.]]

Digital Library

[16]

{16} Leslie Lamport. Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system. Communications of the ACM, 21(7):558-565, July 1978.]]

Digital Library

[17]

{17} T. Mowry and A. Gupta. Tolerating latency through software-controlled prefetching in shared-memory multiprocessors. Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, 12:87-106, June 1991.]]

Digital Library

[18]

{18} J. Singh, W. Weber, and A. Gupta. SPLASH: Stanford parallel applications for shared memory. Computer Architecture News, 20(1):5-44, March 1992.]]

Digital Library

[19]

{19} Thomas von Eicken, David E. Culler, Seth Copen Goldstein, and Karl Erik Schauser. Active messages: A mechanism for integrated communication and computation. In Proceedings of the 19th Annual International Symposiumon Computer Architecture, pages 256-266, May 1992.]]

Digital Library

[20]

{20} Larry D. Wittie, Gudjun Hermannsson, and Ai Li. Eager sharing for efficient massive parallelism. In 1992 International Conference on Parallel Processing , pages 251-255, St. Charles, IL, August 1992.]]

Cited By

Lipkind IPechtchanski IKaramcheti V(1999)Object viewsACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/320385.32043334:10(447-460)Online publication date: 1-Oct-1999
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/320385.320433
Lipkind IPechtchanski IKaramcheti VHailpern BNorthrop L(1999)Object viewsProceedings of the 14th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications10.1145/320384.320433(447-460)Online publication date: 1-Oct-1999
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/320384.320433
Shi WHu WTang Z(1997)An interaction of coherence protocols and memory consistency models in DSM systemsACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review10.1145/271019.27102731:4(41-54)Online publication date: 1-Oct-1997
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/271019.271027
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Message-driven relaxed consistency in a software distributed shared memory
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Parallel computing methodologies
    1. Parallel programming languages
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language features
        Concurrent programming structures
      2. Language types
        Parallel programming languages
  2. Software organization and properties
    1. Contextual software domains
      1. Operating systems
        Communications management
        Memory management
        Distributed memory
        Process management
        Process synchronization

Recommendations

Scalable directory architecture for distributed shared memory chip multiprocessors

Traditional Directory-based cache coherence protocol is far from optimal for large-scale cache coherent shared memory multiprocessors due to the increasing latency to access directories stored in DRAM memory. Instead of keeping directories in main ...
Translation-lookaside buffer consistency in highly-parallel shared-memory multiprocessors
Moving Address Translation Closer to Memory in Distributed Shared-Memory Multiprocessors

To support a global virtual memory space, an architecture must translate virtual addresses dynamically. In current processors, the translation is done in a TLB (Translation Lookaside Buffer), before or in parallel with the first-level cache access. As ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

OSDI '94: Proceedings of the 1st USENIX conference on Operating Systems Design and Implementation

November 1994

228 pages

Sponsors

SIGOPS: ACM Special Interest Group on Operating Systems
USENIX Assoc: USENIX Assoc
IEEE Technical Committee on Operating Systems (TCOS)

Publisher

USENIX Association

United States

Publication History

Published: 14 November 1994

Check for updates

Qualifiers

Article

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

4
Total Citations
View Citations
163
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)52
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)8

Reflects downloads up to 15 Jan 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Lipkind IPechtchanski IKaramcheti V(1999)Object viewsACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/320385.32043334:10(447-460)Online publication date: 1-Oct-1999
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/320385.320433
Lipkind IPechtchanski IKaramcheti VHailpern BNorthrop L(1999)Object viewsProceedings of the 14th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications10.1145/320384.320433(447-460)Online publication date: 1-Oct-1999
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/320384.320433
Shi WHu WTang Z(1997)An interaction of coherence protocols and memory consistency models in DSM systemsACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review10.1145/271019.27102731:4(41-54)Online publication date: 1-Oct-1997
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/271019.271027
Eskicioglu M(1996)A comprehensive bibliography of distributed shared memoryACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review10.1145/218646.21865130:1(71-96)Online publication date: 1-Jan-1996
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/218646.218651

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents