The scalability of multigrain systems

Researchers have recently proposed coupling small- to mediumscale multiprocessors to build large-scale shared memory machines, known as multigrain shared memory systems. Multigrain systems promise low cost because they leverage commodity multiprocessor nodes, and high performance because each multiprocessor node provides fine-grain shared memory mechanisms. Unfortunately, a quantitative study to evaluate the scalability of multigrain systems has thus far been lacking. Such scalability studies are difficult to undertake because of the limited system size that experimental evaluation can explore. This paper studies the scalability of multigrain systems using analysis. The paper proposes a novel methodology for analyzing program behavior on multigrain systems, called synchronization analysis. Synchronization analysis predicts communication volume by examining an application’s synchronization behavior, an effective technique because on software DSMs, actual communication closely follo...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1999
• Where: ICS
• Authors: Donald Yeung
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, ICS 1999, Multigrain Shared Memory, Multigrain Systems, Shared Memory