a comparison of sequential consistency with home-based lazy release consistency for software distributed shared memory
A Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) system provides a distributed application with a shared virtual address space. Choosing a memory consistency model is one of the main decisions in designing a DSM system. While Sequential Consistency provides a simple and intuitive programming model, relaxed consistency models allow memory accesses to be parallelized, improving runtime performance. We implement the home-based lazy release consistency (HLRC) protocol that supports preemptive multithreading and compare its performance with the efficient multithreaded SC protocol. We perform an "apple-to-apple'' comparison on the same testbed environment and benchmark suite, and investigate the effectiveness and scalability of both these protocols.
home-based lazy release consistency distributed shared memory consistency model sequencial consistency