Designing high performance DSM systems using InfiniBand features

Software DSM systems do not perform well because of the combined effects of increase in communication, slow networks and the large overhead associated with processing the coherence protocol. Modern interconnects like Myrinet, Quadrics and InfiniBand offer reliable, low latency (around 5.0 μs point-to-point), and high-bandwidth (10.0 Gbps in 4X InfiniBand). These networks also support efficient memory- based communication primitives like RDMA-Read and RDMA-Write, which allow remote reading and writing of data respectively without receiver intervention. These supports can be leveraged to reduce overhead in a software DSM system. In this paper, we propose a new scheme NGDSM with two components ARDMAR and DRAW for page fetching and diffing, respectively. These components employ RDMA and atomic operations to efficiently implement the coherency scheme. The scheme NGDSM evaluated on an 8-node InfiniBand cluster using SPLASH-2 and TreadMarks applications shows better parallel speedup and scalability.