Efficient Shared Memory Multiprocessing and Object-Oriented Programming

Object-oriented techniques are shown to hold promise for addressing the growing speed gap between memory and processors on shared-memory multiprocessors. However, reducing cache misses can be at the expense of more misses from the translation lookaside buffer (TLB—a cache of recent page translations). This paper presents simulation results from use of a library called OOSH (Object-Oriented Library for Shared Memory), in which cache behaviour is measured. Even for a well-optimized application, the library improves speedup by over 20% on 32 processors. On the other hand, timing on a real machine shows that the TLB problem can impact performance by as much as 25%.