Design issues for a high-performance distributed shared memory on symmetrical multiprocessor clusters

  • Authors:

  • Sumit Roy;Vipin Chaudhary

  • Affiliations:

  • Parallel and Distributed Computing Laboratory, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI 48202, USA;Parallel and Distributed Computing Laboratory, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI 48202, USA

  • Venue:
  • Cluster Computing
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

Clusters of Symmetrical Multiprocessors (SMPs) have recently become the norm for high-performance economical computing solutions. Multiple nodes in a cluster can be used for parallel programming using a message passing library. An alternate approach is to use a software Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) to provide a view of shared memory to the application programmer. This paper describes Strings, a high performance distributed shared memory system designed for such SMP clusters. The distinguishing feature of this system is the use of a fully multi-threaded runtime system, using kernel level threads. Strings allows multiple application threads to be run on each node in a cluster. Since most modern UNIX systems can multiplex these threads on kernel level light weight processes, applications written using Strings can exploit multiple processors on a SMP machine. This paper describes some of the architectural details of the system and illustrates the performance improvements with benchmark programs from the SPLASH-2 suite, some computational kernels as well as a full fledged application. It is found that using multiple processes on SMP nodes provides good speedups only for a few of the programs. Multiple application threads can improve the performance in some cases, but other programs show a slowdown. If kernel threads are used additionally, the overall performance improves significantly in all programs tested. Other design decisions also have a beneficial impact, though to a lesser degree.