Making a DSM consistency protocol hierarchy-aware: an efficient synchronization scheme

We consider the design of DSM consistency protocols for hierarchical architectures. Such architectures typically consist of a constellation of loosely-interconnected clusters, each cluster consisting of a set of tightly-interconnected nodes running multithreaded programs. We claim that high performance can only be reached by taking into account this interconnection hierarchy at the very core of the protocol design. Previous work has focused on improving locality in data management by caching remote data within clusters. In contrast, our idea is to improve locality in the synchronization management. We demonstrate the feasibility through an experimental implementation of this idea in a home-based protocol for Release Consistency, and we provide a preliminary evaluation of the expectable performance gain.