New volatile memory (e.g. Phase Change Memroy) presents fast access, large capacity, byte-addressable, and non-volatility features. These features will bring impacts on the design of current software system. It has become a hot research topic of how to manage it and provide what kind of interface for upper application to use it. This paper proposes FP-Heap. FP-Heap supports direct access to non-volatile memory through a persistent heap interface. With FP-Heap, traditional persistent object systems can benefit directly from the byte-persistency of non-volatile memory. FP-Heap extends current virtual memory manager (VMM) to manage non-volatile memory and maintain a persistent mapping relationship. Also, FP-Heap offers a lightweight transaction mechanism to support atomic update of persistent data, a simple namespace to facilitate data indexing, and a basic access control mechanism to support data sharing. Compared with previous work Mnemosyne, FP-Heap achieves higher performance by its customized VMM and optimized transaction mechanism.

The nondeterminism of message-passing communication brings challenges to program debugging, testing and fault-tolerance. This paper proposes a novel deterministic message-passing implementation (DMPI) for parallel programs in the distributed environment. DMPI is compatible with the standard MPI in user interface, and it guarantees the reproducibility of message with high performance. The basic idea of DMPI is to use logical time to solve message races and control asynchronous transmissions, and thus we could eliminate the nondeterministic behaviors of the existing message-passing mechanism. We apply a buffering strategy to alleviate the performance slowdown caused by mismatch of logical time and physical time. To avoid deadlocks introduced by deterministic mechanisms, we also integrate DMPI with a lightweight deadlock checker to dynamically detect and solve these deadlocks. We have implemented DMPI and evaluated it using NPB benchmarks. The results show that DMPI could guarantee determinism with incurring modest runtime overhead (14% on average).