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Transparent adaptation of sharing granularity in MultiView‐based DSM systems
Author(s) -
Niv Nitzan,
Schuster Assaf
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
software: practice and experience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.437
H-Index - 70
eISSN - 1097-024X
pISSN - 0038-0644
DOI - 10.1002/spe.417
Subject(s) - computer science , granularity , compiler , benchmark (surveying) , distributed shared memory , programmer , distributed computing , consistency (knowledge bases) , adaptation (eye) , shared memory , software , set (abstract data type) , consistency model , parallel computing , operating system , data consistency , memory management , overlay , programming language , uniform memory access , artificial intelligence , physics , geodesy , optics , geography
In this paper we propose a mechanism that provides distributed shared memory (DSM) systems with a flexible sharing granularity. The size of the shared memory units is dynamically determined by the system during runtime. This size can range from that of a single variable up to the size of the entire shared memory space. During runtime, the DSM transparently adapts the granularity to the memory access pattern of the application in each phase of its execution. This adaptation, called ComposedView, provides efficient data sharing in software DSM while preserving sequential consistency. Neither complex code analysis nor annotation by the programmer or the compiler are required. Our experiments indicate a substantial performance boost (up to 80% speed‐up improvement) when running a large set of applications using our method, compared to running these benchmark applications with the best fixed granularity. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.