Efficient Support for Two-Dimensional Data Distributions in Distributed Shared Memory Systems

Despite their clear advantage in scalability, two-dimensional data distributions are not efficiently supported by current software distributed shared memory (SDSM) systems. This is because sharing between nodes occurs on both columns and rows. Sharing in two dimensions is not a good match for SDSM systems, because either a row- or column-major data layout of pages leads to (1) severe thrashing, if a strong memory consistency is used, or (2) exchange of unnecessary data between nodes, if a relaxed memory consistency is used. This paper examines two..