Virtual Shared Memory: A Survey of Techniques and Systems
S Raina · 1992
Shared memory abstraction on distributed memory hardware has become very popular recently. The abstraction can be provided at various levels in the architecture e.g. hardware, software, employing special mechanisms to maintain coherence of data. In this paper we present a survey of basic techniques and review a large number of architectures that provide such an abstraction. We also propose new terminology which is more consistent and orderly as compared with the existing use of terminology for such architectures. 1 Introduction Virtual Shared Memory (VSM) in its most general sense refers to a provision of a shared address space on distributed memory hardware. Such architectures contain no physically shared memory. Instead the distributed local memories collectively provide a virtual address space shared by all the processors. VSM combines the benefits of the ease of programming found in shared-memory multiprocessors with the scalability of message-passing multiprocessors. The implemen...