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USENIX Technical Program - Paper - Proceedings of the Third Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation    [Technical Program]

Pp. 215–228 of the Proceedings
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MultiView and Millipage -
Fine-Grain Sharing in Page-Based DSMs

Ayal Itzkovitz and Assaf Schuster
Computer Science Department
Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
{ayali,assaf}@cs.technion.ac.il

Abstract:

In this paper we develop a novel technique, called MULTIVIEW, which enables implementation of page-based fine-grain DSMs. We show how the traditional techniques for implementing page-based DSMs can be extended to control the sharing granularity in a flexible way, even when the size of the sharing unit varies, and is smaller than the operating system's page size. The run-time overhead imposed in the proposed technique is negligible.

We present a DSM system, called MILLIPAGE, which builds upon MULTIVIEW in order to support sharing in variable-size units. MILLIPAGE efficiently implements Sequential Consistency and shows comparable (sometimes superior) performance to related systems which use relaxed consistency models. It uses standard user-level operating system API and requires no compiler intervention, page twinning, diffs, code instrumentation, or sophisticated protocols. The resulting system is a ``thin'' software layer consisting mainly of a simple, ``clean'' protocol that handles page-faults.



 

Ayal Itzkovitz and Assaf Schuster, The Technion

This paper was originally published in the Proceedings of the Third Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, February 22-25, 1999, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
Last changed: 26 Mar 2002 ml
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