Paging tradeoffs in distributed-shared-memory multiprocessors

Book · Sat Dec 31 00:00:00 EST 1994

OSTI ID:87659

Burger, D C; Hyder, R S; Miller, B P; Wood, D A ^[1]

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1. Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, WI (United States). Computer Sciences Dept.

Massively parallel processors have begun using commodity operating systems that support demand-paged virtual memory. To evaluate the utility of virtual memory, the authors measured the behavior of seven shared memory parallel application programs on a simulated distributed-shared-memory machine. The results (1) confirm the importance of gang CPU scheduling, (2) show that a page-faulting processor should spin rather than invoke a parallel context switch, (3) show that the parallel programs frequently touch most of their data, and (4) indicate that memory, not just CPUs, must be ``gang scheduled``. Overall, the experiments demonstrate that demand paging has limited value on current parallel machines because of the applications` synchronization and memory reference patterns and the machines` high page-fault and parallel-context-switch overheads.

• DOE Contract Number: FG02-93ER25176
• OSTI ID: 87659
• Report Number(s): CONF-941118-; ISBN 0-8186-6605-6; TRN: IM9535%%291
• Resource Relation: Conference: Supercomputing `94 meeting, Washington, DC (United States), 14-18 Nov 1994; Other Information: PBD: 1994; Related Information: Is Part Of Supercomputing `94: Proceedings; PB: 849 p.
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

99 MATHEMATICS
COMPUTERS
INFORMATION SCIENCE
MANAGEMENT
LAW
MISCELLANEOUS
SUPERCOMPUTERS
MEMORY MANAGEMENT
TASK SCHEDULING
PARALLEL PROCESSING
EXECUTIVE CODES
EXPERIMENTAL DATA
DISTRIBUTED DATA PROCESSING
USES