Testing of a Novel Distributed Shared Memory Framework
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Abstract:
A novel object oriented framework for software Distributed Shared Memory
(DSM) has been developed by the Distributed Systems Group in Trinity College,
Dublin for programming parallel applications on a group of loosely coupled
workstations. It offers the developer the ability to apply different rules for how
accesses to shared data are seen by each process (consistency models) which can
be implemented by different means of managing shared data (coherence
protocols). Different combinations of models and protocols can be applied to
individual objects within an application, in addition the protocols that the
framework uses can be customized by the developer.
By providing this range of facilities it is hoped that developers will be able to
exploit application specific semantics to achieve improvements in performance
and speed-up characteristics while maintaining relative ease of programming.
The objective of this project is to test to what extent this DSM framework delivers
the flexibility, customizability and programmability in design of parallel
applications that it promises and whether it can offer appropriate speedup
characteristics for different classes of problem.
Two applications with significantly different data sharing characteristics were
designed and implemented as sample cases to test the framework: the Travelling
Sales Person (TSP) problem which has a low communication-to-computation
ratio and for which workers can work independently of each other; and the LU
Decomposition problem which has a very a high communication-to-computation
ratio and an algorithm where workers are highly interdependent
The thesis will show that the framework did achieve appropriate speed-up
characteristics. It also allows significant flexibility and programmability:
protocols can be easily set and changed for individual objects; the protocols
themselves were customized to improve the performance of each of the
applications.
Author: Markey, Laurence
Advisor:
Tangney, BrendanQualification name:
Master of Science (M.Sc.)Collections
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Computer ScienceMetadata
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