Efficient shared memory multiprocessing and object-oriented programming
Philip Machanick · 1996
Object-oriented techniques are shown to hold promise for addressing the growing speed gap between memory and processors on shared-memory multiprocessors. However, reducing cache misses can be at the expense of more misses from the translation lookaside buffer (TLB---a cache of recent page translations). This paper presents simulation results from use of a library called OOSH (Object-Oriented Library for Shared Memory), in which cache behaviour is measured. Even for a well-optimized application, the library improves speedup by over 20% on 32 processors. On the other hand, timing on a real machine shows that the TLB problem can impact performance by as much as 25%. 1. Introduction Shared-memory multiprocessors based on commodity microprocessors are becoming the an increasingly widely accepted architecture for large-scale computation. However, rapid improvement in processor speed is not being matched by improvement in memory speed. This paper illustrates how an object-oriented approach c...