dunc@eecg.toronto.edu (Duncan Elliott) (10/24/89)
Electrical Engineering Computer Group
Cider Seminar Series
Extending Distributed Shared Memory
to Heterogeneous Environments
by
Songnian Zhou
Department of Computer Science and CSRI
University of Toronto
Time: Friday, Oct. 27, 1989, 12:05 --- Place: GB 248
Distributed shared memory (DSM) provides the threads of a
parallel application running on the hosts of a loosely-coupled
distributed system with a coherent, shared address space, so that
applications may be developed as if for multiprocessor systems with
physical shared memory. As a high-level mechanism for interprocess
communication, distributed shared memory compares favorably to
message passing or remote procedure calling in terms of the ease of
applications programming.
In this talk, I will discuss our work in extending distributed
shared memory to heterogeneous environments, as a means of
integrating workstations and compute servers into a single
distributed system. I will describe our prototype heterogeneous DSM
system implemented on Sun workstations and DEC Firefly
multiprocessor workstations, Mermaid. The rest of the talk will
focus on a series of measurement experiments we conducted to assess
the overhead of DSM in a heterogeneous environment, to study the
performance of applications ported to Mermaid, and to evaluate the
effects of the page sizes used for maintaining data coherency.
This is joint work with Michael Stumm, Tim McInerney, and Dave
Wortman.
Coming Soon
Date Who Topic
Nov. 10 Eugenia Distefano A Multi-DSP Board for Hector
Nov. 17 David Lewis AWSIM-3: A High Performance Hardware
Accelerator for Circuit Simulation