Distributed region-based memory allocation and synchronization. (November 2014)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Symeonidou, Christi; Pratikakis, Polyvios; Nikolopoulos, Dimitrios S; Bilas, Angelos
• Is Part Of: International journal of high performance computing applications. Volume 28:Number 4(2014:Winter)
• Page Start: 406
• Page End: 414
• Publication Date: 2014-11
• Subjects: Memory management -- distributed -- synchronization -- locking; High performance computing -- Periodicals; Supercomputers -- Periodicals; 004.1105
• DOI: 10.1177/1094342014552863
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1094-3420

Abstract

We present DRASync, a region-based allocator that implements a global address space abstraction for MPI programs with pointer-based data structures. The main features of DRASync are: (a) it amortizes communication among nodes to allow efficient parallel allocation in a global address space; (b) it takes advantage of bulk deallocation and good locality with pointer-based data structures; (c) it supports ownership semantics of regions by nodes akin to reader–writer locks, which makes for a high-level, intuitive synchronization tool in MPI programs, without sacrificing message-passing performance. We evaluate DRASync against a state-of-the-art distributed allocator and find that it produces comparable performance while offering a higher-level abstraction to programmers.