MemSpaces: Evaluating the Tuple Space Paradigm in the Context of Memory-Centric Architectures

With memory-centric architectures appearing on the horizon as potential candidates for future computer architectures, we propose that the tuple space paradigm is well suited for the task of managing the large shared memory pools that are a central concept of these new architectures. We support this hypothesis by presenting MemSpaces, an implementation of the tuple space paradigm based on POSIX shared memory objects. To demonstrate both efficacy and efficiency of the approach, we provide a performance evaluation that compares MemSpaces to message-based implementations of the tuple space paradigm. Due to the lack of commercial availability of adequate hardware, we perform the evaluation inside an emulated environment that mimics the general characteristics of memory-centric architectures. For many operations, MemSpaces performs an order of magnitude faster compared to state of the art implementations.