Performance Evaluation of the Orca Shared Object System

• Main Authors: Henri E. Bal, Raoul Bhoedjang, Rutger Hofman, Ceriel Jacobs, Koen Langendoen, Tim Rühl, M. Frans Kaashoek
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 1998
• Subjects: General Terms; Languages; Design; Performance 333333333333333333; Orca
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.46.3061; http://www.irisa.fr/caps/PEOPLE/David/biblio/bal98.ps.gz

Orca is a portable, object-based distributed shared memory system. This paper studies and evaluates the design choices made in the Orca system and compares Orca with other DSMs. The paper gives a quantitative analysis of Orca's coherence protocol (based on write-updates with function shipping), the totally-ordered group communication protocol, the strategy for object placement, and the all-software, user-space architecture. Performance measurements for ten parallel applications illustrate the tradeoffs made in the design of Orca, and also show that essentially the right design decisions have been made. A write-update protocol with function shipping is effective for Orca, especially since it is used in combination with techniques that avoid replicating objects that have a low read/write ratio. The overhead of totally-ordered group communication on application performance is low. The Orca system is able to make near-optimal decisions for object placement and replication. In addition, the.