MM-DSM: Multi-threaded Multi-home Distributed Shared Memory Systems

Most traditional Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) systems support data sharing in multi-process applications. This paper proposed a Multi-threaded Multi-home DSM system (MM-DSM) to support both data sharing and computation synchronization in multi-threaded applications whose threads are grouped into bundles and distributed across multiple computers for parallel execution. Globally shared data are rearranged and assigned to different thread bundles based on their access patterns. As thread bundles move around, their hosting nodes will act as the homes of the associated data blocks to reduce communication cost. Programmers can still stick to the shared memory programming paradigm whereas data consistency, distributed lock, false sharing and multiple writes are taken care of by MM-DSM. Experimental results demonstrate its effectiveness and correctness.