Performance evaluation of the orca shared-object system
Orca is a portable, object-based distributed shared memory (DSM) system. This article studies and evaluates the design choices made in the Orca system and compares Orca with other DSMs. The article gives a quantitative analysis of Orca’s coherence protocol (based on write-updates with function shipp...
| Main Authors: | , , , , , , |
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Text |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
1998
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.95.5570 http://www.st.ewi.tudelft.nl/~koen/papers/tocs98.pdf |
| Summary: | Orca is a portable, object-based distributed shared memory (DSM) system. This article studies and evaluates the design choices made in the Orca system and compares Orca with other DSMs. The article 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 10 parallel applications illustrate the trade-offs made in the design of Orca and 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 article compares the performance of Orca with that of a page-based DSM (TreadMarks) and another object-based DSM (CRL). It also analyzes the communication overhead of the DSMs for several applications. All performance measurements are done on a 32-node Pentium Pro cluster with Myrinet and Fast Ethernet networks. The results show that the Orca programs |
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