CAREER: Sparks: Coherence as an Abstract Type

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Software distributed shared memory (DSM) systems provide the abstraction of shared memory to networks of workstations and distributed memory machines, such as the Paragon, CM-5, or SP-2. Unfortunately, the latencies for global operations in either environment are several orders of magnitude more expensive than on tightly-coupled multiprocessors. The result is that current DSMs perform well for only a restricted class of applications. The Sparks project is designed to address this restriction by providing a protocol construction library that will allow DSM performance to be improved to within a few percent of tightly-coupled multiprocessors. Sparks' abstractions allow the design space of high-level synchronization operations to be explored cleanly and systematically, rather than in an ad hoc fashion. The emphasis is more on creating and investigating the abstractions that make a broad variety of optimizations possible, rather than on the individual optimizations themselves. However, the performance gains allowed by the synchronization types created via the Sparks library will be thoroughly quantified. The Sparks interface will be implemented in CVM, a new distributed shared memory system. In addition to providing support services to Sparks, CVM implements novel coherence protocols and multi- threading support. ***