Can High Performance Software DSM Systems Designed With InfiniBand Features Benefit from PC.pdfVIP

Can High Performance Software DSM Systems Designed With InfiniBand Features Benefit from PCI-Express? Ranjit Noronha and Dhabaleswar K. Panda Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering The Ohio State University Columbus, OH 43210 {noronha,panda}@ Abstract ditionally, most SDSM systems used the request-response The performance of software distributed shared mem- model shown in Figure 1. In this model, a node might ory systems has traditionally been lower than other pr o- need to access a particular datum for processing. The node gramming models primarily because of overhead in the co- initiates a request to the owner of the datum. The owner herency pr otocol, comunication bottlenecks and slow net- processes this datum and sends a response back to the re- works. Software DSMs have benefitedfr om interconnection questor. The receiver might need to process a large number technologies like Myrinet, InfiniBand and Quadrics which of requests from different nodes, increasing wait times for offer low latency and high bandwidth communication. Ad- the SDSM system. The high overhead of network commu- ditionally, some of theirfeatur es like RDMA and atomic op- nication, coupled with a heavy processing load at the re- erations have been used to implement some portions of the ceiver were some of the factors, making it hard to achieve software DSM pr otocols directly,futher reducing overhead. improved performance from SDSM’s. Such network aware pr otocols are dependent