About the sensitivity of the HLRC-DU protocol on diff and page sizes

Abstract

Recent research on software distributed shared memory systems has focused on consistency protocols for improving performance. Home Lazy Release Consistency (HLRC) protocols have been widely adopted due to their performance advantages. Usually, these protocols invalidate pages through write notices. Variants of these protocols propose some criterion to update data of the corresponding pages instead of invalidating. In a previous paper, we proposed the HLRC-DU protocol, which is an improved version of the HLRC protocol. The HLRC-DU embeds update information in those write notices whose corresponding diff size is less than a given threshold, invalidating the remainder. The threshold trades off network bandwidth with update perfonnance. In this paper, we study the HLRC-DUprotocol’s sensitivity to page size and the threshold size selection. Our results show that while the page size slightly impacts performance, that our protocols are highly sensitive to the threshold value.