An efficient thread architecture for a distributed shared memory on symmetric multiprocessor clusters

Abstract

The purpose of the paper is to demonstrate an efficient thread architecture for a distributed shared memory (DSM) system on symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) clusters. For DSM systems on SMP, how to utilize the processors efficiently without wasting available computational power is a major issue. We discuss three approaches that use the process, the kernel level thread, and the user level thread to map application threads onto execution entities respectively. Considering the advantages and disadvantages of each method, we construct our thread package by combining both the user level thread and the kernel level thread. User level threads correspond to application threads and kernel level threads schedule these user level threads across multiple processors. Threads are light weighted and can be migrated in our thread package. With this thread architecture, our DSM system performs well in elementary experiments.