Isotach Projects


 Current isotach systems projects include the DARPA sponsored build of a prototype isotach system; an NSF sponsored study of delta cache coherence protocols; and Army Simtech/NGIC sponsored work on isotach based parallel production (rule-based) systems.


 
Isotach Prototype DARPA
The isotach prototype project is building a prototype isotach system designed to implement isotach logical time in a way that is efficient and scalable. The tasks of maintaining isotach logical time and ordering messages is done in hardware by special isotach-specific devices, but the prototype consists primarily of commodity parts: PCs running Linux interconnected with Myrinet. An initial version of the prototype gives low cost message ordering even though this initial version emulates the functionality of the isotach specific components in software.

 
Delta Cache Protocols National Science Foundation
 Isotach networks support a family of cache coherence protocols called delta cache protocols that are more concurrent that other directory protocols. Delta cache protocols
  • support multiple concurrent reads and writes to the same cache block;
  • allow processes to pipeline memory accesses without sacrificing sequential consistency; and
  • allow processes to read and write multiple shared cache blocks atomically without obtaining exclusive access right to the accessed blocks.
    • The delta cache project is studying the performance of delta cache protocols, exploring extensions of  the protocols, and writing a compiler targeting isotach systems.


     
    IsoRule National Ground Intelligence Center
     The IsoRule project is exploring the application of isotach technology to the problem of speeding up the execution of production (rule-based) systems. Isorule is an asynchronous parallel production system that uses isotach ordering properties to ensure that each rule fires atomically. Since rules fire atomically, execution can be asynchronous without risk of an incorrect (unserializable) execution. The asynchronous approach to parallel production systems avoids the synchronization bottleneck represented by the traditional Match/Recognize/Act cycle. The project is implementing IsoRule on top of an initial version of the isotach prototype.

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