A causal logging scheme for lazy release consistent distributed shared memory systems

Abstract

This paper presents a causal logging scheme for the lazy release consistent distributed shared memory systems. Causal logging is a very attractive approach to provide fault tolerance for distributed systems, since it eliminates the need for stable logging. However since interprocess dependency must causally be transferred with the normal messages, the excessive message overhead has been a drawback of this approach. In order to achieve an efficient implementation of causal logging for distributed shared memory systems, the data structures and the operations supported by the lazy release consistency memory model are utilized. For example, to implement the sender-based logging of the message contents, the diff structure is utilized, and for the causal logging of the dependency information, the operations to support the causal propagation of the write notices are utilized. As a result, the causal logging for the lazy release consistent distributed shared memory system can be implemented with a very low overhead. The simulation results using parallel applications show only 1%-4.4% increases in the execution time.