Odin: Implications and Performance of a Novel DSM Design
Arnold Pears · 2007
This paper describes the design of a high performance single address space multiprocessor architecture (Odin). The relevance of the model to other investigations is discussed, and the important features of the Odin approach are presented. In particular Odin includes novel features which address the problems of locality and data caching, and memory and cache consistency. The contributions of the paper lie in the use of a segmented stack structure to achieve low cost thread migration, and the use of a new hardware based fine grain consistency protocol which reduces false sharing and network usage while improving data locality. Performance results obtained using DiST (an execution driven distributed architecture simulator) are presented for two sample algorithms. The results compare the prototype's performance with that of a bus based multiprocessor of equivalent processing power. Keywords: Single address-space, multiprocessor design, simulation, evaluation. 1. Background Odin, like the ...