Using page access behavior for load sharing on software distributed shared memory system

Performance of a software distributed shared memory (DSM) system can be improved if load sharing is employed. However, traditional load sharing algorithms are not directly suitable for DSM systems since they do not consider the memory access patterns of tasks. This paper presents a load sharing algorithm that takes into account memory access patterns as well as individual processor load information to distribute tasks in a DSM environment. A vector that keeps track of the frequency of page accesses by tasks is used to determine the processor with the best locality of access. The general idea is to minimize the amount of remote page accesses. Simulation results are presented to illustrate the behavior of the algorithm