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Selected Papers on Shared Memory Multiprocessors and Distributed Shared Memory Multiprocessors from the Past 10 Years
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Jones, William M. |
| Copyright Year | 2001 |
| Abstract | Over the course of the last decade, considerable research has been done in the areas of Shared Memory Multiprocessors (SMP's) as well as Distributed Shared Memory (DSM's) machines. Suppling powerful computing solutions to a wide variety of scientists and engineers requires ongoing research efforts. Such efforts include improving the existing technologies by analyzing the currently limiting bottlenecks in both hardware and software. Often it is necessary to investigate the requirements of the end-users' applications in an attempt to identify features that may be used to the designers advantage. Additionally, it is not sufficient to simply improve the bottom-line raw performance that one may obtain from such machines. To truly make SMP's and DSM's viable solutions to advanced computing, there has to be support from a front-end point of view that allows typical users to exploit these machines to their fullest extent. In this paper, I will address several personally selected research activities in this area from the past ten years. Predominately, these activities may be partitioned into two main areas: Communication Latency Reduction (Section 2) and Programming Language and Compiler Support (Section 1). This paper is intended to be a broad overview of the numerous papers I encountered during research process. I will, however, be taking a more in-depth look at a few of the papers that interested me the most. It is my intention that this will provide additional learning, which of course, is what this is all about. 1 Programming Language and Compiler Support Much of the research in the area of programming language support for DSM's resides in providing an intelligent layer of abstraction that gives the programmer a shared memory look-and-feel while using physically distributed memory systems. This often includes dealing with such questions as: “How do I allow programmers access to the type of synchronization primitives they are accustomed to in this programming model?” and “How do I address global name-spacing and data access patterns to optimize for the efficient use of the underlying communication subsystem?” This section presents research that provides insight into these questions as well as others. 1.1 An Efficient Shared Memory Layer for Distributed Memory Machines Daniel Scales, et al. at Stanford University are working on a system referred to as SAM [12] SAM is essentially a shared memory (SM) interface for a network of workstations (NOW). It allows the programmer to utilize the power of clusters with the ease of the SM programming paradigm. SAM's creators assert that the ability to have a global name space and caching of remotely accessed data are of the utmost importance in scientific applications with irregular communication patterns and parallelism. SAM is based on explicit use of constructs in the language that allow the programmer to indicate where both communication and synchronization is to take place. In this way, the system offers a hybrid message passing (MP) capability as well as the SM model for the programmer. They were able to implement SAM on several systems including: the CM-5, Intel iPSC/860, IBM SP/1, as well as many others. 1.2 Fine-grain Access Control for Distributed Shared Memory David Wood, et. al. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison developed a system referred to as Blizzard.[3] Blizzard is a completely software approach to controlling access to memory. The |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.parl.clemson.edu/~wjones/classes/ece842/survey.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
