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Writer-Owns Page Consistency ProtocolDistributed shared memory (DSM) alleviates the need to program message passing explicitly on a distributed-memory machine. In order to reduce memory latency, a DSM replicates copies of data. This paper examines several current approaches to controlling thrashing caused by false sharing in a DSM. Then it introduces a novel memory consistency protocol, writer-owns, which detects and eliminates false sharing at run time. In iterative computations, where the data is accessed similarly every iteration, eliminating false sharing can have tremendous benefits because the overhead is only incurred once. Performance results show that the writer-owns protocol is competitive with and often better than existing approaches. |