A Cost-Comparison Approach for Adaptive Distributed Shared Memory

The focus of this paper is on software implementations of Distributed Shared Memory (DSM). In recent years, many protocols for implementing DSM have beenproposed. Performance of these protocols depends on the memory access behavior of the applications. Some researchers have proposed DSMs that provide a family of consistency protocols or application-specific protocols, and the programmer is allowed to choose any one of them for each shared memory object (or page) or each stage of an application. While such implementations have a potential for achieving optimal performance, they impose undue burden on the programmer. Therefore, some adaptive schemes that automatically choose the appropriate protocol have beenproposed. This paper presents asimple approach for implementing adaptive DSMs. The approach is illustrated with the example of an adaptive DSMbasedon the invalidate andcompetitive update protocols. The objective of the adaptive scheme is to minimize a pre-defined "cost" function. Th..