Comparing latency-tolerance techniques for software DSM systems

We study the isolated and combined effects of several latency-tolerance techniques for software-based distributed shared-memory systems (software DSMs). More specifically, we focus on data prefetching, update-based coherence, and single-writer optimizations for page-based software DSMs. Our experimental results with six parallel applications show that, when these techniques are carefully combined, they can provide running time and speedup improvements of up to 54 percent and 110 percent, respectively, on a cluster of eight PCs.