NONH:A New Cache-Based Coherence Protocol for Linked List Structure DSM System and Its Performance Evaluation

The management of memory coherence is an important problem in distributed shared memory (DSM) system. In a cache-based coherence DSM system using linked list structure, the key to maintaining the coherence and improving system performance is how to manage the owner in the linked list. This paper presents the design of a new management protocol-NONH (New-OwnerNew-Head) and its performance evaluation. The analysis results show that thisprotocol can improve the scalability and performence of a coherent DSM system using linked list. It is also suitable for managing the cache coherency in tree-like hierarchical architecture.

Efficient Handling of Lock Hand-off in DSM Multiprocessors with Buffering Coherence Controllers

Synchronization in parallel programs is a major performance bottleneck in multiprocessor systems. Shared data is protected by locks and a lot of time is spent on the competition arising at the lock hand-off. In order to be serialized, requests to the same cache line can either be bounced （NACKed） or buffered in the coherence controller. In this paper, we focus mainly on systems whose coherence controllers buffer requests. In a lock hand-off, a burst of requests to the same line arrive at the coherence controller. During lock hand-off only the requests from the winning processor contribute to progress of the computation, since the winning processor is the only one that will advance the work. This key observation leads us to propose a hardware mechanism we call request bypassing, which allows requests from the winning processor to bypass the requests buffered in the coherence controller keeping the lock line. We present an inexpensive implementation of request bypassing that reduces the time spent on all the execution phases of a critical section （acquiring the lock, accessing shared data, and releasing the lock） and which, as a consequence, speeds up the whole parallel computation. This mechanism requires neither compiler or programmer support nor ISA or coherence protocol changes. By simulating a 32-processor system, we show that using request bypassing does not degrade but rather improves performance in three applications with low synchronization rates, while in those having a large amount of synchronization activity （the remaining four）, we see reductions in execution time and in lock stall time ranging from 14% to 39% and from 52% to 7170, respectively. We compare request bypassing with a previously proposed technique called read combining and with a system that bounces requests, observing a significantly lower execution time with the bypassing scheme. Finally, we analyze the sensitivity of our results to some key hardware and software parameters.

Evaluation of Remote-I/O Support for a DSM-Based Computation Offloading Scheme

Computation offloading enables mobile devices to execute rich applications by using the abundant computing resources of powerful server systems. The distributed shared memory based (DSM-based) computation offloading approach is expected to be especially popular in the near future because it can dynamically migrate running threads to computing nodes and does not require any modifications of existing applications to do so. The current DSM-based computation offloading scheme, however, has focused on efficiently offloading computationally intensive applications and has not considered the significant performance degradation caused by processing the I/O requests issued by offloaded threads. Because most mobile applications are interactive and thus yield frequent I/O requests, efficient handling of I/O operations is critically important. In this paper, we quantitatively analyze the performance degradation caused by I/O processing in DSM-based computation offloading schemes using representative commodity applications. To remedy the performance degradation, we apply a remote I/O scheme based on remote device support to computation offloading. The proposed approach improves the execution time by up to 43.6% and saves up to 17.7% of energy consumption in comparison with the existing offloading schemes. Selective compression of the remote I/O scheme reduces the network traffic by up to 53.5%.