Transparently consistent asynchronous shared memory

Abstract

The advent of many-core processors is imposing many changes on the operating system. The resources that are under contention have changed; previously, CPU cycles were the resource in demand and required fair and precise sharing. Now compute cycles are plentiful, but the memory per core is decreasing. In the past, scientific applications used all the CPU cores to finish as fast as possible, with visualization and analysis of the data performed after the simulation finished. With decreasing memory available per core, as well as the higher price (in power and time) for storing data on disk or sending it over the network, it now makes sense to run visualization and analytics applications in-situ, while the application is running. Visualization and analytics applications then need to sample the simulation memory with as little interference and as little changes in the simulation code as possible.