Aggressive release consistency for software distributed shared memory

Abstract

As a software-based distributed shared memory (DSM) system is especially sensitive to the traffic amount over the network, we propose a new software DSM model. The model postpones the enforcement of data coherence at the time of the first shared memory access after an acquire, instead of at the time of the acquire like the lazy release consistency (LRC) model. This leads to an aggressive implementation of release consistency and thus a reduced number of messages transferred over the network when compared with LRC. Our model is evaluated on the basis of the TreadMarks framework using three applications, where TreadMarks is a software DSM implementation following LRC. The experimental results on a network of workstations indicate that our model leads to fewer messages transmitted across the network than LRC, by over 16% for one application and over 12% for the other two.