The trade-off between implicit and explicit data distribution in shared-memory programming paradigms
Dimitrios S. Nikolopoulos, Eduard Ayguadé, Theodore S. Papatheodorou, Constantine D. Polychronopoulos, Jesús Labarta · 2001
This paper explores previously established and novel methods for scaling the performance of OpenMP on NUMA architectures. The spectrum of methods under investigation includes OS-level automatic page placement algorithms, dynamic page migrationd manual data distribution. The trade-off that these methods face lies between performance and programming effort. Automatic page placement algorithms are transparent to the programmer, but may compromise memory access locality. Dynamic page migration is also transparent, but requires careful engineering of online algorithms to be effective. Manual data distribution on the other requires substantial programming effort and architecture-specific extensions to OpenMP, but may localize memory accesses in a nearly optimal manner.