- Abstract:
-
A DSM (Distributed-Shared Memory) cluster is an attractive parallel computing platform for scientific research as it provides programming advantages within a scalable and cost-effective hardware solution. This benefit derives from the fact that a DSM system provides a shared-memory abstraction on top of a distributed-memory machine by caching data replicas locally. In this respect, a coherence protocol is a vital component responsible for assuring data consistency across all replicas. The design of coherence protocols impacts a DSM system in terms of both performance and accuracy. Performance is often measured via simulation and various verification techniques have been proposed to deal with protocol accuracy. Nevertheless, integrating accuracy verification into a DSM cluster simulation to ensure correct simulation results is still an open issue.
In this paper, we address three properties of a coherence protocol (safety, liveness, and inclusion) without which errors may occur in the simulation results. We propose a Specification-based Parameter-Model Interaction (SPMI) technique to detect these cases in a particular DSM cluster simulation called DSiMCluster. Our experimental results demonstrate that with SPMI, DSiMCluster can ensure the coherence protocol properties and provides a correct reflection in the simulation model of the memory characteristics of real shared-memory and distributed-shared memory multiprocessors.
- Links To Paper
- No links available
- Bibtex format
- @InProceedings{EDI-INF-RR-0530,
- author = {
W. Marurngsith
and Roland Ibbett
},
- title = {Specification-Based Parameter-Model Interaction: Towards a Correct Reflection of Memory Characteristics in a DSM Cluster Simulation},
- book title = {Procs of Summer Computer Simulation Conference},
- year = 2005,
- month = {Jul},
- }
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