Experimental Software Systems: Integrated Applications and Systems Research in Software Shared Memory

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

9806751Singh, Jaswinder PalLi, KaiPrinceton UniversityExperimental Software Systems: Integrated Applications and Systems Research in Software Shared MemoryA coherent shared address space (SAS) is an attractive programming model for parallel computing. It is emerging as commercially successful when implemented in hardware on tightly coupled multiprocessors. With less tightly coupled clusters of workstations or symmetric multiprocessors becoming important platforms, it is important to support this model in software on clusters as well. Otherwise, the need to run applications on both types of platforms may drive the more difficult explicit message passing model to dominate. This research develops and evaluates software SAS systems on clusters of various scales and organizations. The research is distinguished by being highly application-driven, including collaboration with application scientists. It examines protocols/systems and applications simultaneously without treating either as fixed. Protocols and systems are enhanced based on bottlenecks encountered in real applications, the role of hardware support is examined, and different software approaches are compared. The focus is on both programming ease and performance, and includes comparing the SAS and message passing models on tightly-coupled systems and clusters. The research will result in new, scalable software SAS systems, a greater integration of applications and systems research that is now necessary for major advances, and a better understanding of the tradeoffs in programming models across platforms.