The Effect of Contention on the Scalability of
Page-Based Software Shared Memory Systems
- Authors
- Eyal de Lara
- Y. Charlie Hu
- Honghui Lu
- Alan L. Cox
- Willy Zwaenepoel
- Abstract
- In this paper, we examine the causes and effects of contention for shared
data access in parallel programs running on a software
distributed shared memory (DSM) system.
Specifically, we experiment on two widely-used, page-based protocols,
Princeton's home-based lazy release consistency (HLRC) and TreadMarks.
For most of our programs, these protocols were equally affected by
latency increases caused by contention and achieved similar
performance. Where they differ significantly, HLRC's ability to
manually eliminate load imbalance was the largest factor accounting
for the difference. To quantify the effects of contention we
either modified the application to eliminate the cause of the
contention or modified the underlying protocol to efficiently handle
it. Overall, we find that contention has profound effects on
performance: eliminating contention reduced execution time by 64% in
the most extreme case, even at the relatively modest scale of 32 nodes that
we consider in this paper.
- Published
- Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Languages, Compilers, and Run-time Systems for Scalable Computers (LRC2000). Rochester, NY, USA. May 25-27, 2000.
- Text
- Short version as presented at conference (PostScript
, PDF)
- Final version in Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science series (PostScript
, PDF)