Evaluating Weak Memories with Maya
Divyakant Agrawal, Manhoi Choy, Hong Va Leong, Ambuj K. Singh · 1994
Maya is a simulation platform for evaluating the performance of parallel programs on parallel architectures with different memory coherence protocols. Rapid prototyping of different memory protocols supporting varying degrees of coherence is possible and the impact of these protocols on the performance of application programs can be studied. Implementations of existing weak memories along with some new primitives using Maya are presented. The results of running some user applications are summarized and the impact of weak memories on the efficiency of parallel programs is discussed. Keywords: distributed shared memory, memory consistency, parallel programming, weak memories 1 Introduction Programming parallel systems is a difficult task. The inherent concurrency of these systems poses a number of problems, namely, data placement, load balancing, race conditions, and non-determinism. Using message passing for interprocess communication adds a further degree of complexity since the pr...