Title
LCM: Memory System Support for Parallel Language Implementation
Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Publication Date
11-1-1994
Publication Title
Proceedings of the sixth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems (ASPLOS)
Conference or Event
sixth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems (ASPLOS)
Department
Mathematics and Computer Science
Abstract
Higher-level parallel programming languages can be difficult to implement efficiently on parallel machines. This paper shows how a flexible, compiler-controlled memory system can help achieve good performance for language constructs that previously appeared too costly to be practical.Our compiler-controlled memory system is called Loosely Coherent Memory (LCM). It is an example of a larger class of Reconcilable Shared Memory (RSM) systems, which generalize the replication and merge policies of cache-coherent shared-memory. RSM protocols differ in the action taken by a processor in response to arequestfor a location and the way in which a processorreconcilesmultiple outstanding copies of a location. LCM memory becomes temporarily inconsistent to implement the semantics of C** parallel functions efficiently. RSM provides a compiler with control over memory-system policies, which it can use to implement a language's semantics, improve performance, or detect errors. We illustrate the first two points with LCM and our compiler for the data-parallel language C**.
pp.
208-218
WorldCat Link
Provider Link
Citation
"LCM: Memory System Support for Parallel Language Implementation." In the Proceedings of the sixth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems (ASPLOS), pp. 208-218, October 1994.