Moving Home-based lazy release consistency for software DSM systems

Abstract

While a software DSM system is a cost-effective way to provide an illusion of shared memory to programmers, the performance of the system is limited by its inherent overheads. Several protocols such as Lazy Release Consistency(LRC) and Home-base LRC(HLRC) have been suggested to overcome the overheads. In this paper, we propose a new all-software protocol, Moving Home-based LRC(MHLRC). Its main contribution is to introduce a new concept, Moving Home. Using it, our protocol provides 4 efficient functionalities: a)providing migration mechanism b)eliminating the duty of updating the home copy at the end of an interval c)providing an adaptive home locating scheme d)simplifing the update procedure on a stale copy To evaluate our protocol, we implemented a prototype of MHLRC. In the result of the experiment with 4 benchmarks, our protocol improves the performance of the system by on the average 10% over LRC, and by up to 96% over HLRC. From the detailed analysis, we found that the improvement mainly comes from the reduction of the coherence action overhead. Our protocol also reduces the requirement for memory and network bandwidth.