Implementation and performance evaluation of Locust

Locust is a distributed shared virtual memory system that exploits compile-time data dependency information to address the issues of false sharing, cache coherence overhead, and affinity process scheduling. The paper reports the results and their analysis of a comprehensive performance evaluation study of the first Locust prototype, which is implemented on a 12-node Pentium cluster running FreeBSD and has been fully operational for a year. The results show that for the set of regular programs tested, the performance of Locust is within 1-8% of that of the message passing system implemented on the same hardware/software platform. The main performance gain of Locust as compared to existing weak cache consistency models mainly comes from the elimination of unnecessary synchronizations using the generational cache coherence protocol, and the function-shipping approach of implementing synchronization operations.