Visualising Sharing Behaviour in relation to Shared Memory Management
Mats Brorsson, Per Stenström · 1992
Accesses to the shared memory remain to be a major performance limitation in shared memory multiprocessors. Scalable multiprocessors with distributed memory also poses the problem of keeping the memory coherent. A large number of shared memory coherence mechanisms has been proposed to solve this problem. Their relative performance is, however, determined by the sharing behaviour of the workloads. This paper presents a methodology to capture and visualise the sharing behaviour of a parallel program with respect to the choice coherence mechanisms. We identify four conceptual workload parameters: Spatial granularity, Degree of sharing, Access mode, and the Temporal Granularity. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the methodology, we