Hardware Supported Synchronization Primitives for Clusters.
Alberto Ferreira De Souza, Sotério Ferreira de Souza, Claudio Luis Amorim, Priscila M. V. Lima, Peter A. Rounce · 2008
Abstract- Parallel architectures with shared memory are well suited to many applications, provided that efficient shared memory access and process synchronization mechanisms are available. When the parallel machine is a cluster with physically distributed memory, software based synchronization mechanisms together with virtual memory infrastructure can implement Software Distributed Shared Memory (S-DSM), a shared memory abstraction on a distributed memory machine. However, the communication network overload from the emulation can limit the performance of such systems. This problem motivated our research, in which we developed a set of synchronization primitives for S-DSM on reconfigurable hardware. This hardware implements an auxiliary synchronization network, which works in parallel to the data communication network. Experiments evaluating our hardware implementation against a software one showed that our system increases the performance of these S-DSM primitives by a factor of 40 or more.