Publications
Detailed Information
Memory Management for Multi-Threaded Software DSM Systems
Cited 2 time in
Web of Science
Cited 1 time in Scopus
- Authors
- Issue Date
- 2004-01
- Publisher
- Elsevier
- Citation
- Parallel Computing, Vol. 30, No. 1, pp. 121-138, 2004
- Keywords
- Distributed shared memory ; Atomic page update ; Memory consistency ; Cluster of symmetric multiprocessors
- Abstract
- When software distributed shared memory (SDSM) systems provide multithreading to exploit
cluster of symmetric multiprocessors (SMPs), a challenge is how to preserve memory
consistency in a thread-safe way, which is known as atomic page update problem. In this
paper, we show that this problem can be solved by creating two independent access paths
to a physical page and by assigning different access permissions to them. Especially, we propose
three new methods using System V shared memory inter-process communication (IPC), a
new mdup() system call, and a fork() system call in addition to a known method using file
mapping. The main contribution of this paper is to introduce various solutions to the atomic
page update problem and to compare their characteristics extensively. Experiments carried out
on a Linux-based cluster of SMPs and an IBM SP Night Hawk system show that the proposed
methods overcome the drawbacks of the file mapping method such as high initialization cost
and buffer cache flushing overhead. In particular, the method using a fork() system call preserves
the whole address space to the application.
- ISSN
- 0167-8191
- Language
- English
- Files in This Item:
- There are no files associated with this item.
Item View & Download Count
Items in S-Space are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.