Kirk L. Johnson, M. Frans Kaashoek,
and Deborah
A. Wallach. CRL: High-Performance All-Software Distributed
Shared Memory. Appears in Proceedings of the Fifteenth
Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, December 1995. (An
earlier version of this work appeared as Technical Report
LCS-TM-517, MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, March 1995.)
(compressed
postscript)
Abstract:
The C Region Library (CRL) is a new all-software distributed shared memory (DSM) system. CRL requires no special compiler, hardware, or operating system support beyond the ability to send and receive messages. It provides a simple, portable, region-based shared address space programming model that is capable of delivering good performance on a wide range of multiprocessor and distributed system architectures. Each region is an arbitrarily sized, contiguous area of memory. The programmer defines regions and delimits accesses to them using annotations.
We have developed CRL implementations for two platforms: the Thinking Machines CM-5, a commercial multicomputer, and the MIT Alewife machine, an experimental multiprocessor offering efficient support for both message passing and shared memory. We present results for up to 128 processors on the CM-5 and up to 32 processors on Alewife. In a set of controlled experiments, we demonstrate that CRL is the first all-software DSM system capable of delivering performance competitive with hardware DSMs. CRL achieves speedups within 15% of those provided by Alewife's native support for shared memory, even for challenging applications (e.g., Barnes-Hut) and small problem sizes.