Producer-Push - A Protocol Enhancement to Page-Based Software Distributed Shared Memory Systems

This paper describes a technique called producer-push that enhances the performance of a page-based software distributed shared memory system. Shared data, in software DSM systems, must normally be requested from the node that produced the latest value. Producer-push utilizes the execution history to predict this communication so that the data is pushed to the consumer before it is requested. In contrast to previously proposed mechanisms to proactively send data to where it is needed, producer-push uses information about the source code location of communication to more accurately predict the needed communication. Producer-push requires no source code modifications of the application and it effectively reduces the latency of shared memory accesses. This is confirmed by our performance evaluation which shows that the average time to wait for memory updates is reduced by 74%. Producer-push also changes the communication pattern of an application making it more suitable for modern networks. The latter is a result of a 44% reduction of the average number of messages and an enlargement of the average message size by 65%.