We evaluate the effect of processor speed, network characteristics, and software overhead on the performance of release-consistent software distributed shared memory. We examine five different protocols for implementing release consistency: eager update, eager invalidate, lazy update, lazy

The large granularity of communication and coherence in shared virtual memory systems causes problems with false sharing and extra communication. Relaxed memory consistency models have been used to alleviate these problems, but at a cost in programming complexity. Release Consistency (RC) and Lazy

. The lazy release consistent protocols achieve this reduction in communication by piggybacking consistency information on top of existing synchronization transfers. Some of the protocols also improve performance by speculatively moving data. We evaluate the impact of these features by comparing

and the fast processors. Unless carefully controlled, such architectural optimizations can cause memory accesses to be executed in an order different from what the programmer expects. The set of allowable memory access orderings forms the memory consistency model or event ordering model for an architecture.

Release consistency is a widely accepted memory model for distributed shared memory systems. Eager release consistency represents the state of the art in release consistent protocols for hardware-coherent multiprocessors, while lazy release consistency has been shown to provide better performance

Munin is a distributed shared memory (DSM) system that allows shared memory parallel programs to be executed efficiently on distributed memory multiprocessors. Munin is unique among existing DSM systems in its use of multiple consistency protocols and in its use of release consistency. In Munin

Today’s globally networked society places great demand on the dissemination and sharing of information. While in the past released information was mostly in tabular and statistical form, many situations call today for the release of specific data (microdata). In order to protect the anonymity

This paper presents an evaluation of three software implementations of release consistency. Release consistent protocols allow data communication to be aggregated, and multiple writers to simultaneously modify a single page. We evaluated an eager invalidate protocol that enforces consistency when

. This paper presents a Heuristic Diff Acquiring (HDA) protocol in Lazy Release Consistency (LRC) based distributed shared memory (DSM) systems. Based on the run-time detection of associations between locks and data, the HDA can selectively piggy-back useful page diffs in a lock grant message

;software-only" approach and the hardware approach that uses directory-based caches. Automatic update is a simple communication mechanism, implemented in the SHRIMP multicomputer, that forwards local writes to remote memory transparently. In this paper we propose a new lazy release consistency based protocol, called