A distributed heap storage manager has been implemented on the Fujitsu AP1000 multicomputer. The performance of various pre-fetching strategies is experimentally compared. Subjective programming benefits and objective performance benefits of up to 10% in pre-fetching are found for certain applications, but not for all. The performance benefits of pre-fetching depend on the specific data structure and access patterns. We suggest that control of pre-fetching strategy be dynamically under the control of the application.
@article{arxiv.cs/9810002,
title = {Pre-fetching tree-structured data in distributed memory},
author = {Lex Weaver and Chris Johnson},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cs/9810002},
year = {2007}
}