An Evaluation of Software Distributed Shared Memory for Next-Generation Processors and Networks

We evaluate the effect of processor speed, network characteristics, and software overhead on the performance of release-consistent software distributed shared memory. We examine five different protocols for implementing release consistency: eager update, eager invalidate, lazy update, lazy invalidate, and a new protocol called lazy hybrid. This lazy hybrid protocol combines the benefits of both lazy update and lazy invalidate. Our simulations indicate that with the processors and networks that are becoming available, coarse-grained applications such as Jacobi and TSP perform well, more or less independent of the protocol used. Medium-grained applications, such as Water, can achieve good performance, but the choice of protocol is critical. For sixteen processors, the best protocol, lazy hybrid, performed more than three times better than the worst, the eager update. Fine-grained applications such as Cholesky achieve little speedup regardless of the protocol used because of the frequency of synchronization operations and the high latency involved. While the use of relaxed memory models, lazy implementations, and multiple-writer protocols has reduced the impact of false sharing, synchronization latency remains a serious problem for software distributed shared memory systems. These results suggest that future work on software DSMs should concentrate on reducing the amount of synchronization or its effect.