MENPS: A Decentralized Distributed Shared Memory Exploiting RDMA

The spread of RDMA-capable interconnects on supercomputers has enabled the middleware developers to explore new design options for runtime systems based on efficient communications. Observing low-latency networks and shared-memory infrastructure for multi-core processors, we have focused on extending shared-memory abstraction into multiple nodes exploiting RDMA, i.e., Distributed Shared Memory (DSM). We have found that the traditional protocols of DSM designed for two-sided communications cannot fully exploit the performance of RDMA, which necessitates decentralization and coarse-grained communications. To solve this problem, we introduced two methods for the DSM coherence protocol to exploit RDMA and implemented a DSM library MENPS using this protocol. Our evaluation shows that MENPS could accelerate two of five shared-memory applications with minimal modifications and beat an existing RDMA-based DSM runtime.