A performance study of the cancelback protocol for Time Warp

Abstract

This work presents results from an experimental evaluation of the space-time tradeoffs in Time Warp augmented with the cancelback protocol for memory management. An implementation of the cancelback protocol on Time Warp is described that executes on a shared memory multiprocessor, a 32 processor Kendall Square Research Machine (KSR1). The implementation supports canceling back more than one object when memory has been exhausted. The limited memory performance of the system is evaluated for three different workloads with varying degrees of symmetry. These workloads provide interesting stress cases for evaluating limited memory behavior. We, however, make certain simplifying assumptions (e.g., uniform memory requirement by all the events in the system) to keep the experiments tractable. The experiments are extensively monitored to determine the extent to which various overheads affect performance. It is observed that (i) depending on the available memory and asymmetry in the workload, canceling back several (called the salvage parameter) events at one time may improve performance significantly, by reducing certain overheads, (ii) a performance nearly equivalent to that with unlimited memory can be achieved with only a modest amount of memory depending on the degree of asymmetry in the workload.