Implementing Fine-grain Distributed Shared Memory on Commodity SMP Workstations
Ioannis Schoinas, Babak Falsafi, Mark D. Hill, James R. Larus, Chris E. Lukas, Shubhendu S. Mukherjee, Steven K. Reinhardt, Eric C. Schnarr, David Alvra Wood · 1996
This paper reports our experience implementing the Blizzard fine-grain distributed shared memory system on a network of unmodified dual-processor workstations running a commercial operating system. The paper describes and measures: three fine-grain access control mechanisms (optimized software, commodity hardware, and custom hardware); a low-latency, user-level communication layer; kernel support in a commercial operating system; and techniques to exploit multiprocessor (SMP) nodes. The results show that a network of workstations can effectively support fine-grain shared memory, but that high performance requires either custom network hardware or custom coherence protocols. 1 Introduction