An Improved DSM System Design and Implementation

In this paper, an Improved Distributed Shared Memory (IDSM) system, a hybrid version of shared memory and message passing version is proposed. This version effectively uses the benefits of shared memory in terms of ease of programming and message passing in terms of efficiency. Further it is designed to effectively utilize the stateof-art multicore based network of workstations and supports standard PThread interface and OpenMP model for writing shared memory programs as well as MPI interface for writing message passing programs. This system has been studied using standard SPLASH-2 (Stanford ParalleL Applications for SHared memory 2), NPB (NAS Parallel Benchmarks), IMB (Intel MPI Benchmarks) benchmarks and some well known parallel algorithms. Its performance has been compared with JIAJIA DSM system that uses efficient scope consistency model for shared memory programs and with MPI library (MPICH2) on network of Linux systems for MPI programs. Improved Lazy Release Consistency model implemented in IDSM system is compared with Lazy Release Consistency model of TreadMarks system. In many cases IDSM was found to perform much better than those systems.