Software Distributed Shared Memory over Virtual Interface Architecture: Implemenation and Performance

In this paper, we describe an implementation of software Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) over Virtual Interface Architecture (VIA) for a Linux-based cluster of PCs and evaluate its performance. VIA is a user-level memory-mapped communication model that provides zero-copy communication and low-overhead by excluding the operating system kernel from the communication path. To our best knowledge, our implementation is the first software DSM protocol on VIA. The DSM protocol we have implemented on VIA is Home-based Lazy Release Consistency (HLRC) that previous studies have shown to exhibit good scalability by reducing the number of messages and memory overhead compared to the homeless counterpart. The experimental results obtained on seven Splash-2 applications show that VIA can be successfully used to support software shared memory on clusters of PCs. The paper is accompanied by a source-code distribution of the software DSM protocol for Linux/VIA clusters.