Interprocessor Invocation on a NUMA Multiprocessor

On a distributed shared memory machine, the problem of minimizing accesses to remote memory modules is crucial for obtaining high performance. We describe an object-based, parallel programming system called OSMIUM to support experiments with mechanisms for performing invocations on remote objects. The mechanisms we have studied include non-cached access to remote memory, data migration, and function-shipping using an interprocessor invocation protocol IIP. Our analyses and experiments indicate that IIP competes well with the alternatives, especially when the structure of user programs requires synchronized access to data structures. While these results are obtained on a NUMA multiprocessor, they are also applicable to systems that use hardware cache coherency techniques.