Locality and Performance of Page- and Object-Based DSMs

In The 12th International Parallel Processing Symposium (IPPS), March 1998.

Bryan Buck and Pete Keleher



Abstract:
This paper presents simulated results comparing representatives of two approaches to software DSM: an object-based protocol and a page-based protocol. We explore the performance implications of each approach, including the object approach's advantages in bandwidth consumption and lack of false sharing. However, the locality and data aggregation advantages of page-based systems prove to be the dominant factor given typical operating system overheads. We show that large page sizes actually improve the performance of multi-writer protocols. This prefetching effect eliminates a majority of remote misses, without significantly increasing bandwidth requirements. For three out of the four applications we tested, our page-based protocol matched or outperformed our object-based protocol under typical operating systems costs. We quantify this effect, and conclude with a discussion of techniques that could allow each approach to benefit from the best features of the other.


@inProceedings{buck-ipps98,
	title = "Locality and Performance of Page- and Object-Based {DSM}s",
	author = "Bryan Buck and Pete Keleher",
	booktitle = {The 12th International Parallel Processing Symposium (IPPS)},
	month = {March},
	year = {1998},
}


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