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Message Passing Versus Distributed Shared Memory on Networks of Workstations

Honghui Lu
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Rice University
Houston, TX 77005
hhl@cs.rice.edu
(713)527-8750 ext. 2852

Sandhya Dwarkadas
Department of Computer Science
Rice University
sandhya@cs.rice.edu

Alan L.Cox
Department of Computer Science
Rice University
alc@cs.rice.edu

Willy Zwaenepoel
Department of Computer Science
Rice University
willy@cs.rice.edu

Keywords

Message passing, Distributed shared memory, Lazy release consistency, PVM, TreadMarks

Abstract

The message passing programs are executed with the Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) library and the shared memory programs are executed using TreadMarks. The programs are Water and Barnes-Hut from the SPLASH benchmark suite; 3-D FFT, Integer Sort (IS) and Embarrassingly Parallel (EP) from the NAS benchmarks; ILINK, a widely used genetic linkage analysis program; and Successive Over-Relaxation (SOR), Traveling Salesman (TSP), and Quicksort (QSORT). Two different input data sets were used for Water (Water-288 and Water-1728), IS (IS-Small and IS-Large), and SOR (SOR-Zero and SOR-NonZero). Our execution environment is a set of eight HP735 workstations connected by a 100Mbits per second FDDI network.

For Water-1728, EP, ILINK, SOR-Zero, and SOR-NonZero, the performance of TreadMarks is within 10%of PVM. For IS-Small, Water-288, Barnes-Hut, 3-D FFT, TSP, and QSORT, differences are on the order of 10%to 30%. Finally, for IS-Large, PVM performs two times better than TreadMarks.

More messages and more data are sent in TreadMarks, explaining the performance differences. This extra communication is caused by 1) the separation of synchronization and data transfer, 2) extra messages to request updates for data by the invalidate protocol used in TreadMarks, 3) false sharing, and 4) diff accumulation for migratory data in TreadMarks.

Copyright 1995 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. (ACM).

A postscript version of this paper is available at ftp://cs.rice.edu/public/TreadMarks/papers/sc95.ps.gz, and any of the authors' home page.

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