S-DSM for Heterogeneous Machine Architectures
Eduardo Pinheiro, DeQing Chen, Sandhya Dwarkadas, Srinivasan Parthasarathy, Michael Lee Scott · 2000
Many---indeed most---distributed applications employ some notion of distributed shared state: information required at more than one location. For applications that span the Internet, this state is almost always maintained by means of hand-written, application-specific messagepassing protocols. These protocols constitute a significant burden on the programmer. Rochester's InterWeave project seeks to eliminate this burden by automating the management of shared state for processes on heterogeneous, distributed machines. Heterogeneity implies the need for strong typing and for automatic conversion to and from a common wire format when transmitting data and updates between machines. In addition to issues of byte order, alignment, and numeric formats, transparent sharing implies the need for pointers that refer to arbitrary shared locations, and that operate with the speed of ordinary machine addresses when the target is locally cached. To satisfy these constraints, InterWeave employs a typ...