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Performance implications of communication mechanisms in all-software global address space systems

Authors:

Chi-Chao Chang,

Grzegorz Czajkowski, and

Thorsten von EickenAuthors Info & Claims

PPOPP '97: Proceedings of the sixth ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and practice of parallel programming

June 1997

Pages 230 - 239

https://doi.org/10.1145/263764.263794

Published: 21 June 1997 Publication History

Abstract

Global addressing of shared data simplifies parallel programming and complements message passing models commonly found in distributed memory machines. A number of programming systems have been designed that synthesize global addressing purely in software on such machines. These systems provide a number of communication mechanisms to mitigate the effect of high communication latencies and overheads. This study compares the mechanisms in two representative all-software systems: CRL and Split-C. CRL uses region-based caching while Split-C uses split-phase and push-based data transfers for optimizing communication performance. Both systems take advantage of bulk data transfers.By implementing a set of parallel applications in both CRL and Split-C, and running them on the IBM SP2, Meiko CS-2 and two simulated architectures, we find that split-phase and push-based bulk data transfers are essential for good performance. Region-based caching benefits applications with irregular structure and with sufficient temporal locality, especially under high communication latencies. However, caching also hurts performance when there is insufficient data reuse or when the size of caching granularity is mismatched with the communication granularity. We find the programming complexity of the communication mechanisms in both languages to be comparable. Based on our results, we recommend that an ideal system intended to support diverse applications on parallel platforms should incorporate the communication mechanisms in CRL and Split-C.

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Cited By

Czajkowski GChi-Chao Chang von Eicken T(1998)Building parallel runtime systems with Active MessagesProceedings International Symposium on Software Engineering for Parallel and Distributed Systems10.1109/PDSE.1998.668161(83-93)Online publication date: 1998
https://doi.org/10.1109/PDSE.1998.668161
Chang CCzajkowski Gvon Eicken TKesselman CCrawford D(1997)Evaluating the performance limitations of MPMD communicationProceedings of the 1997 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing10.1145/509593.509604(1-10)Online publication date: 15-Nov-1997
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/509593.509604

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

PPOPP '97: Proceedings of the sixth ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and practice of parallel programming

June 1997

287 pages

ISBN:0897919068

DOI:10.1145/263764

Chairmen:
Rob Schreiber
Hewlett-Packard Labs, Palo Alto, CA
,
Keshav Pingali
Cornell Univ., Ithaca, NY
,
Editor:
Michael A. Berman

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 32, Issue 7
July 1997
287 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/263767
Chairmen:
Rob Schreiber
Hewlett-Packard Labs, Palo Alto, CA
,
Keshav Pingali
Cornell Univ., Ithaca, NY
,
Editor:
A. Michael Berman
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 1997 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 21 June 1997

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PPoPP97: Principles & Practices of Parallel Programming

June 18 - 21, 1997

Nevada, Las Vegas, USA

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PPOPP '97 Paper Acceptance Rate 26 of 86 submissions, 30%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 230 of 1,014 submissions, 23%

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Cited By

Czajkowski GChi-Chao Chang von Eicken T(1998)Building parallel runtime systems with Active MessagesProceedings International Symposium on Software Engineering for Parallel and Distributed Systems10.1109/PDSE.1998.668161(83-93)Online publication date: 1998
https://doi.org/10.1109/PDSE.1998.668161
Chang CCzajkowski Gvon Eicken TKesselman CCrawford D(1997)Evaluating the performance limitations of MPMD communicationProceedings of the 1997 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing10.1145/509593.509604(1-10)Online publication date: 15-Nov-1997
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/509593.509604

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