TY - JOUR
T1 - An application-driven study of multicast communication for write invalidation
AU - Hsiao, Hung Chang
AU - King, Chung Ta
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors would like to thank reviewers for their valuable assistance and cooperation. The authors would also like to thank the National Science Council of the Republic of China for nancially supporting this research under Contract No. NSC89-2213-E-007-048 and NSC89-2213-E-007-050.
PY - 2001/3
Y1 - 2001/3
N2 - In distributed shared-memory (DSM) multiprocessors, a write operation requires multiple messages to invalidate the nodes which share and cache the memory block to being written. The consequent write stall time impedes the performance of such systems. An effective means of achieving efficient invalidation is to employ multicast messages to reach the sharing nodes. This study evaluates two multicast-based invalidation schemes, dual-path and pruning, by performing application-driven simulation. The experimental settings used herein find that multicasts improve invalidation traffic for four of the six evaluated real applications. The remaining two applications are computationally intensive, and multicast-based invalidation is less effective. However, since multicasts encourage bursty communication, our results indicate that they help relieve network congestion during these periods. Dual-path performs slightly better than pruning, because it is less sensitive to routing delay in the routers. Our results further demonstrate that cache size is an important design parameter for multicast-based invalidation, and is highly effective for DSM multiprocessors with larger caches.
AB - In distributed shared-memory (DSM) multiprocessors, a write operation requires multiple messages to invalidate the nodes which share and cache the memory block to being written. The consequent write stall time impedes the performance of such systems. An effective means of achieving efficient invalidation is to employ multicast messages to reach the sharing nodes. This study evaluates two multicast-based invalidation schemes, dual-path and pruning, by performing application-driven simulation. The experimental settings used herein find that multicasts improve invalidation traffic for four of the six evaluated real applications. The remaining two applications are computationally intensive, and multicast-based invalidation is less effective. However, since multicasts encourage bursty communication, our results indicate that they help relieve network congestion during these periods. Dual-path performs slightly better than pruning, because it is less sensitive to routing delay in the routers. Our results further demonstrate that cache size is an important design parameter for multicast-based invalidation, and is highly effective for DSM multiprocessors with larger caches.
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U2 - 10.1023/A:1008161716113
DO - 10.1023/A:1008161716113
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:0035277682
VL - 18
SP - 279
EP - 304
JO - Journal of Supercomputing
JF - Journal of Supercomputing
SN - 0920-8542
IS - 3
ER -