Cachier: A Tool for Automatically Inserting CICO Annotations

Shared memory in a parallel computer provides prowith the valuable abstraction of a shared address space--through which any part of a computation can access any datum. Although uniform access simplifies programming, it also hides communication, which can lead to inefficient programs. The check-in, check-out (CICO) performance model for cache-coherent, shared-memory parallel computers helps a programmer identify the communication underlying memory references and account for its cost. CICO consists of annotations that a programmer can use to elucidate communication and a model that attributes costs to these annotations. The annotations can also serve as directives to a memory system to improve program performance. Inserting CICO annotations requires reasoning about the dynamic cache behavior of a program, which is not always easy. This paper describes Cachier, a tool that automatically inserts CICO annotations into shared-memory programs. A novel feature of this tool is its use of both ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1994
• Where: ICPP
• Authors: Trishul M. Chilimbi, James R. Larus
• Keywords: CICO Annotations, Communication Underlying Memory, Distributed And Parallel Computing, ICPP 1994, Shared-memory Parallel Computers