JIAJIA - A Software DSM System

New Version 2.1

Characteristics:

• Physical memories of multiple workstations are combined to form a larger shared space. In other recent DSM systems such as Quarks, TreadMarks, and CVM the shared address space is limited by the size of local main memory. In JIAJIA, the size of shared space can be as large as the sum of each machine's local memories.
• A locked-based cache coherence protocol for scope consistency is proposed to simplify the design. Our protocol is lock-based because it totally eliminates directory and all coherence related actions are taken through accessing write notices kept on the lock. Compared to the directory-based protocol, the lock-based protocol is simpler and consequently more efficient and scalable.
• A new NUMA-like memory organization scheme which is taken to ease shared memory management. With the simplicity of this shared memory organization scheme and of scope consistency semantics, JIAJIA totally eliminates the complexity of diffs keeping, garbage collection, local address to global address tranisition, and vector timestamp maintenance.
• A flexible shared memory allocation call is provided to allow the programmer to control the distribution of shared locations.

New Features

• A home migration scheme is implemented to migrate home pages adaptively according to the application sharing pattern.
• A write vector technique is implemented to reduce message amount in home-based software DSMs. With this scheme, the faulting processor fetches only those blocks that are modified since last fetch.
• An adaptive write detection scheme is implemented to reduce write faults on read-only pages.
• An new function call jia_config() is provided to turn home migration, write vector, adaptive write detection and other optimization methods on and off in the application program.

Platforms

Currently, JIAJIA runs on SUN SPARCstations running SUNOS4.1.3, Solaris 2.4 or above, IBM SP2 with AIX4.1, Dawning 1000A with AIX 4.1, Dawning 2000I with AIX 4.2, X86-based Linux 2.0 and Windows NT.

JIAJIA Release

JIAJIA version 2.1 and old version 2.0 are free to download. Before downloading , please fill the Register form first to get the software. The new programming manual for version 2.1 is also available in Postscript (277KB) (English version). We also provide Chinese version programming manual for version 2.1.

More Information

If you want to know more about JIAJIA, or if you want to be informed when a new version of JIAJIA is released, please email to dsm@water.chpc.ict.ac.cn.

People Involved with JIAJIA

JIAJIA was primarily developed by Prof. Weiwu Hu and Weisong Shi, under the direction of Prof. Zhimin Tang at the Center of High Performance Computing, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Zhiyu Zhou ported some applications to JIAJIA. Tian He ported JIAJIA to Windows NT.

last modified August 25th, 1999