Parallel Management of Large Dynamic Shared Memory Space: A Hierarchical FEM Application

We show in this paper the memory management issues raised by a parallel irregular and dynamic hierarchical application, which constantly allocates and deallocates data over an extremely large virtual address space. First, we show that if memory caches data locality is necessary, a lack of virtual pages locality may greatly a ect the obtained performance. Second, fragmentation and contention problems associated with the required parallel dynamic memory allocation are presented. We propose practical solutions and discuss experimentation results obtained on a cache{coherent non uniform memory access (ccNUMA) distributed shared memory SGI Origin2000 machine.