A comprehensive distributed shared memory system that is easy to use and program

Abstract

An analysis of the distributed shared memory (DSM) work carried out by other researchers shows that it has been able to improve the performance of applications, at the expense of ease of programming and use. Many implementations require application programmers to write code to explicitly associate shared variables with synchronization variables or to label the variables according to their access patterns. Programmers are required to explicitly initialize parallel applications and, in particular, to create DSM parallel processes on a number of workstations in the cluster of workstations. The aim of this research has been to improve the ease of programming and use of a DSM system while not compromising its performance. RHODOS' DSM allows programmers to write shared memory code exploiting their sequential programming skills without the need to learn the DSM concepts. The placement of DSM within the operating system allows the DSM environment to be automatically initialized and transparent. The results of running two applications demonstrate that our DSM, despite paying attention to ease of programming and use, achieves high performance.