Accelerated access to shared distributed arrays on distributed memory systems by access objects

Abstract

In case of algorithms with non-local data access patterns virtual shared memory implementations commonly result in a huge lack of performance because of virtual shared memory latency. In order to avoid this problem, a system providing access to distributed data structures has been developed, implemented as a C++ object library. By means of this library the programmer may use special access objects as agents to access the distributed data structures. In case of accessing arrays these access objects may be buffers or queues. If the algorithms are suited for using these access objects, the communication bandwidth instead of the communication latency becomes the major performance factor.