Implementation and Performance of DSMPI

Issue title: Paradigms and Compilers for Parallel Processing

Article type: Research Article

Authors: SILVA, LUIS M. | SILVA, JOÃO GABRIEL | CHAPPLE, SIMON

Affiliations: Departamento Engenharia Informática, Universidade de Coimbra-POLO II, Vila Franca-3030 Coimbra, Portugal; e-mail: [email protected] | Quadstone Ltd., 16 Chester Street, Edinburgh, EH3 7RA, Scotland; e-mail: [email protected]

Abstract: Distributed shared memory has been recognized as an alternative programming model to exploit the parallelism in distributed memory systems because it provides a higher level of abstraction than simple message passing. DSM combines the simple programming model of shared memory with the scalability of distributed memory machines. This article presents DSMPI, a parallel library that runs atop of MPI and provides a DSM abstraction. It provides an easy-to-use programming interface, is fully, portable, and supports heterogeneity. For the sake of flexibility, it supports different coherence protocols and models of consistency. We present some performance results taken in a network of workstations and in a Cray T3D which show that DSMPI can be competitive with MPI for some applications.

Journal: Scientific Programming, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 201-214, 1997