Orca: A Language for Parallel Programming of Distributed Systems
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Active messages: a mechanism for integrated communication and computation
ISCA '92 Proceedings of the 19th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
LogP: towards a realistic model of parallel computation
PPOPP '93 Proceedings of the fourth ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and practice of parallel programming
Integrating message-passing and shared-memory: early experience
PPOPP '93 Proceedings of the fourth ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and practice of parallel programming
Working sets, cache sizes, and node granularity issues for large-scale multiprocessors
ISCA '93 Proceedings of the 20th annual international symposium on computer architecture
CC++: a declarative concurrent object-oriented programming notation
Research directions in concurrent object-oriented programming
Where is time spent in message-passing and shared-memory programs?
ASPLOS VI Proceedings of the sixth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
The performance advantages of integrating block data transfer in cache-coherent multiprocessors
ASPLOS VI Proceedings of the sixth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
Implications of hierarchical N-body methods for multiprocessor architectures
ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS)
IBM Systems Journal
CRL: high-performance all-software distributed shared memory
SOSP '95 Proceedings of the fifteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
Message passing versus distributed shared memory on networks of workstations
Supercomputing '95 Proceedings of the 1995 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing
Low-latency communication on the IBM RISC system/6000 SP
Supercomputing '96 Proceedings of the 1996 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing
Global arrays: a portable "shared-memory" programming model for distributed memory computers
Proceedings of the 1994 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing
Experience with active messages on the Meiko CS-2
IPPS '95 Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Parallel Processing
Message Proxies for Efficient, Protected Communication on SMP Clusters
HPCA '97 Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture
Evaluating the performance limitations of MPMD communication
SC '97 Proceedings of the 1997 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
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.