MaX — Investigating shared virtual memory

Abstract

This paper presents a test suite for mapping algorithmic requirements onto shared virtual memory (SVM) architectures. The goal of this study is to gain insight into SVM behavior and to suggest suitable SVM configurations with regard to application demands. MaX, a Mach 3.0 eXternal SVM server represents the core of our system providing SVM functionality, a reservoir for SVM protocols and monitoring capability. The test environment is particularly developed with flexibility and scalability in mind, in order to adapt to specific algorithmic profiles and to cope with real-world applications up to massively parallel systems. The paper discusses initial results which demonstrate the feasibility of this approach and encourage us to further extensions. The need for a detailed study of SVM architectures' behavior is emphasized even more, when considering the current tendency of computer manufacturer (e.g., Cray T3D [6], Sun S3.mp [5]) towards implicit communication on distributed systems.