Region-Oriented Main Memory Management in Shared-Memory NUMA Multiprocessors

The need to achieve higher performance through greater degrees of parallelism necessitates distributing the memory throughout a multiprocessor system to reduce contention and increase scalability. Unfortunately, such Non-Uniform Memory Access time (NUMA) multiprocessors introduce complications for the programmers, who must now be concerned with the physical distribution of their data in order to extract good performance from the system. The impact of remote memory accesses can be reduced through replication and migration, either in processor caches or in main memory. Unfortunately, the effectiveness of caches is limited for large data sets due to capacity misses, while dynamic virtual memory page management suffers from a mismatch between the pages being replicated and the data structures in programs. In this thesis we propose that data be partitioned into Shared Regions reflecting the granularity of data sharing in programs, and that special synchronization calls be added to enforce p..