Shared virtual memory with automatic update support
Liviu Iftode, Matthias A. Blumrich, Cezary Dubnicki, David Oppenheimer, Jaswinder Pal Singh, Kai Li · 1999
Shared virtual memory systems provide the abstraction of a shared address space on top of a messagepassing communication architecture. The overall performance of an SVM system therefore depends on both the raw performance of the underlying communication mechanism and the e#ciency with which the SVM protocol uses that mechanism. The Automatic Update Release Consistency (AURC) protocol was proposed to take advantage of simple memory-mapped communication and automatic update support to accelerate a shared virtual memory protocol. However, there has not yet been a real system on which an implementation of this protocol could be evaluated. This paper reports our evaluation of AURC on the SHRIMP multicomputer, the only hardware platform that supports an automatic update mechanism. Automatic update propagates local memory writes to remote memory locations automatically. We compare the AURC protocol with its all-software counterpart protocol, Home-based Lazy Release Consistency (HLRC). By int...