Binding time in distributed shared memory architectures

This paper revisits three distributed shared memory (DSM) architectures to clarify them with their binding times for new addresses at the local memory: page fault time, node miss time, and cache miss time. The DSM architectures which have different binding times arrange data in different ways with different overheads at an event of reference. Since a large number of cache misses can occur in a large (relative to the cache size) working set, binding at the page fault time alone cannot efficiently utilize locality of reference at the local memory. In a small working set, most of the addresses bound to the local memory at a node miss time are not effective due to the low cache miss rate. This paper shows that binding at the cache miss time can improve system performance.