Design and Implementation of Proteus

This paper describes the design, implementation, and a performance evaluation of a Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) system called Proteus which aims to support dynamic node reconfiguration. Proteus allows users to shorten the execution time of their DSM programs by dynamically adding nodes to the system. Furthermore, competition for resource between system users and computer owners can be avoided by dynamically deleting nodes from the system. To make the system efficiently adapting to node configuration, Proteus uses several techniques, which include the adaptive workload redistribution, the affinity page movement, and the forced update. The consistency models supported by Proteus are both sequential consistency and release consistency. The programming environment provided is similar to PRESTO. In this paper, we focus the description on the design and implementation of node reconfiguration in Proteus. In addition, a performance evaluation is also presented in this paper. The results showed that the performance of the programs can be improved by taking advantage of node reconfiguration. Furthermore, our techniques work well in communication minimization and overhead minimization.