2nd USENIX Windows NT Symposium
   
[Technical Program]
Page 170 of the Proceedings | |
Chime:
A Windows NT based parallel processing system
Shantanu
Sardesai
Tandem Computers Incorporated
shantanu.sardesai@tandem.com
Partha
Dasgupta
Arizona State University
partha@asu.edu
This research is partially
supported by grants from DARPA/Rome Labs, Intel
Corporation and NSF.
|
Introduction |
Shared memory multiprocessors are the best
platform for writing parallel programs. These platforms
support a variety of parallel processing languages (such
as CC++ which provide programmer-friendly constructs for
expressing shared data, parallelism, synchronization and
so on. However the cost and lack of scalability and
upgradability of shared memory multiprocessor machines,
make them a less than perfect platform.Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) has been
promoted as the solution that makes a network of
computers look like a shared memory machine. This
approach is supposedly more natural than the message
passing method used in PVM and MPI.
However, most programmers find this is
not the case. The shared memory in DSM systems do not
have the same access and sharing semantics as shared
memory in shared memory multi-processors. For example,
only a designated part of the process address space is
shared, linguistic notions of global and local variables
do not work intuitively, parallel functions cannot be
nested and so on.
Chime is the first system that
provides a true shared memory multiprocessor environment
on a network of machines. It achieves this by
implementing the CC++ language (shared memory) on a
distributed system. In addition to shared memory,
parallelism and synchronization features of CC++, Chime
also provides fault-tolerance and load balancing.
|
Chime
Features |
Chime addresses most of the problems in a
simple, clean and efficient manner by providing a
multiprocessor-like shared memory programming model on
network of workstations, along with automatic
fault-tolerance and load balancing. Some of the salient
features of the Chime system are:
- Complete implementation of the
shared memory part of the CC++ language.
- Support for nested parallelism;
i.e. a parallel task can spawn more parallel
tasks.
- Consistent memory model, i.e. the
global memory is shared and all descendants
(which execute in parallel) share the local
memory of a parent task.
- Machines may join the computation
at any point in time (speeding up the
computation) or leave or crash at any point
without affecting the progress (slowdowns will
occur).
- Faster machines do more work than
slower machines, and the load of the machines can
be varied dynamically (load balancing).
In fact, there is very little overhead
associated with these features, over the cost of
providing DSM. This is a documented feature that Chime
shares with its predecessor Calypso.
|
Chime
Architecture |
A program written in CC+ is preprocessed
to convert it to C++. Then it is linked with the Chime
runtime library and a single executable file is
generated. This executable is executed on a network of
machines (or workstations). One of the workstations is
designated as the manager and the rest as workers.
All run the same executable.A
program starts on the manager. When the program reaches a
parallel construct, parallel tasks are generated and are
allocated by the manager to the waiting workers. During
the execution of the parallel step, the manager does
scheduling and allocation of parallel tasks, as well as
memory management.
The manager and worker are
multithreaded, the programmer written code is executed by
one thread and the other thread handles all the runtime
functions. The runtime functions include servicing DSM
requests, inter-task synchronization, cactus stacks for
proper stack sharing and scheduling that handles fault
tolerance and load balancing. Chime is implemented on
Windows NT.
The performance tests of Chine show
that it it performs well for a variety of parallel
programs. The nested parallelism and synchronization
support however adds considerable overhead in a
distributed system. The Chime system can be downloaded
from https://milan.eas.asu.edu.
|
|