Design Issues of Prefetching Strategies for Heterogeneous Software DSM

In Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) systems, one of the major overheads is page fault, because it induces remote memory access latencies. Prefetching strategy permits home nodes sending data to remote nodes in advance, in order to reduce page faults and latencies, as also to improve overall performance; however, it causes accumulated waiting phenomenon, waiting synchronization phenomenon, among others. In heterogeneous environments, considering the fact of different ability among computing hosts, it increases idle time and synchronization time. Therefore, the search for alternatives to reduce these overheads is important. In this paper, we propose a method that utilizes concepts of load balancing in prefetching strategy, where the goal is to reduce idle time and synchronization time. Basically, this approach distributes home pages to appropriate computing nodes and adjusts prefetching strategy’s policies into heterogeneous environments.