Improving the performance of software distributed shared memory with speculation

We study the performance benefits of speculation in a release consistent software distributed shared memory system. We propose a new protocol, Speculative Home-based Release Consistency (SHRC), that speculatively updates data at remote nodes to reduce the latency of remote memory accesses. Our protocol employs a predictor that uses patterns in past accesses to shared memory to predict future accesses. We have implemented our protocol in a release consistent software distributed shared memory system that runs on commodity hardware. We evaluate our protocol implementation using eight software distributed shared memory benchmarks and show that it can result in significant performance improvements.