Question: Why does the tree-structured communication pattern on the right reduce contention? What is the highly contended resource in this example?
BigFish
The highly contended resource is the topmost element in the figure, which can be the shared variable to be updated.
In the flat communication pattern, every process is competing to update the resource, but only one is allowed to update it each time.
In the tree-structured communication pattern, the processes at the next level first send their updates to above level and merge the updates together. Then it recursively send updates to above level until reaching the root. In this case, processes in different branches are able to merge their updates together at the same time, which reduces contention to the shared resources.
Question: Why does the tree-structured communication pattern on the right reduce contention? What is the highly contended resource in this example?
The highly contended resource is the topmost element in the figure, which can be the shared variable to be updated.
In the flat communication pattern, every process is competing to update the resource, but only one is allowed to update it each time.
In the tree-structured communication pattern, the processes at the next level first send their updates to above level and merge the updates together. Then it recursively send updates to above level until reaching the root. In this case, processes in different branches are able to merge their updates together at the same time, which reduces contention to the shared resources.