Synchronization and memory consistency on Intel Single-chip Cloud Computer
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Typ
Examensarbete för masterexamen
Master Thesis
Master Thesis
Program
Computer systems and networks (MPCSN), MSc
Publicerad
2014
Författare
Walulya, Ivan
Modellbyggare
Tidskriftstitel
ISSN
Volymtitel
Utgivare
Sammanfattning
The Single-chip Cloud Computer (SCC) is an experimental multicore processor created by Intel Labs for the many-core research community. The chip is built to study many-core processors, their programmability and scalability while utilising messagepassing as a communication model. The chip has a distributed memory architecture that combines fast-access on-chip memory with large amounts of off-chip private and shared memory. Additionally, its design is meant to favour message-passing over the traditional shared-memory programming as is the norm for distributed memory systems. To this effect, the platform deliberately provides neither hardware supported cache-coherence, nor atomic memory read/write operations across cores and the on-chip memory, also known as message passing buffer is quite small. The SCC provides support for very fast communications among the cores with reduced latency. This allows for the creation of very efficient message-passing protocols and support for message-passing programming model. This design employs explicit exchange of messages among different processors, implicitly avoiding data consistency issues arising from concurrent data access and merges both communication and synchronization. However, due to the limited size of the message passing buffers, the message-passing is ideal for transfer of small amounts of data, but not very efficient for large data transfers. In addition, replicating all datasets and exchanging them as messages is less efficient and more wasteful than using the data directly in shared memory. In some cases, the message data read from the main memory, is passed through the message passing buffers and eventually written back to the same memory modules. Besides, the chip provides access to shared memory allowing the cores to share data without necessarily copying it among the cores over the on-chip network. In this thesis, we develop procedures for sharing data among multiple cores; concurrently coordinated by message-passing on the Single-chip Cloud Computer. We further make and investigate a proposition that, for architectures that combine message-passing with shared-memory, the message-passing is not necessarily essential for data-transfer but for coordinating shared-memory access and synchronization of operations on the different cores.
Beskrivning
Ämne/nyckelord
Data- och informationsvetenskap , Computer and Information Science