Improving performance of a DSM system by the communication controller optimizations

A DSM (distributed shared memory) system is typically made up of nodes which communicate by sending and receiving messages over a network. The handling of messages in a node is carried out in the communication controller which includes the protocol processor as its most occupied part. The performance of a DSM system depends greatly on the message handling efficiency. In order to improve this efficiency, some ways of optimizing the communication controller, such as decentralized control of the message flow and the message priority queues, are proposed. The efficiency of the proposed optimizations is evaluated by simulation with representative parallel applications from the SPLASH-2 suite. Based on the obtained results, it can be generally concluded that the proposed optimizations can decrease the stalling time of the processor by 15% on average.