SMARTMAP: Operating system support for efficient data sharing among processes on a multi-core processor

Abstract

This paper describes SMARTMAP, an operating system technique that implements fixed offset virtual memory addressing. SMARTMAP allows the application processes on a multi-core processor to directly access each other's memory without the overhead of kernel involvement. When used to implement MPI, SMARTMAP eliminates all extraneous memory-to-memory copies imposed by UNIX-based shared memory strategies. In addition, SMARTMAP can easily support operations that UNIX-based shared memory cannot, such as direct, in-place MPI reduction operations and one-sided get/put operations. We have implemented SMARTMAP in the Catamount lightweight kernel for the Cray XT and modified MPI and Cray SHMEM libraries to use it. Micro-benchmark performance results show that SMARTMAP allows for significant improvements in latency, bandwidth, and small message rate on a quad-core processor.