Abstract - Technical Program - OSDI 99
MultiView and Millipage - Fine-Grain Sharing in Page-Based DSMs
Ayal Itzkovitz, Assaf Schuster
Technion-Israel Institute of Technology
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.
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