In Distributed Shared Memory systems, false sharing occurs when two different data items, not shared but accessed by two different processors, are allocated to a single block and is an important factor in degrading system performance. The paper first ...
In Distributed Shared Memory systems, false sharing occurs when two different data items, not shared but accessed by two different processors, are allocated to a single block and is an important factor in degrading system performance. The paper first analyzes shared memory allocation and reference patterns in parallel applications that allocate memory for shared data objects using a dynamic memory allocator. The shared objects are sequentially allocated and generally show different reference patterns. If the objects with the same size are requested successively as many times as the number of processors, each object is referenced by only a particular processor. If the objects with the same size are requested successively much more than the number of processors, two or more successive objects are referenced by only particular processors. On the basis of these analyses, we propose a memory allocation scheme which allocates each object requested by different processors to different pages and evaluate the existing memory allocation techniques for reducing false sharing faults. Our allocation scheme reduces a considerable amount of false sharing faults for some applications with a little additional memory space.