Overview of Distributed Shared Memory
Alan Judge, Paddy Nixon, Brendan Tangney, Stefan Weber · 1998
... shared memory gives transparent process-to-process communication, shared memory programming is a well-understood problem (compared with message passing), shared memory programs are usually shorter and easier to understand than equivalent message-passing programs, and large or complex data structures may easily be communicated without marshalling. This transparency and ease of use is associated with a cost and dsm applications are sometimes slower than hand-coded message-passing implementations. In fact, it has traditionally been believed that a well-built, hand-tuned and optimised, message-passing implementation of a parallel program will out-perform a shared-memory implementation. However, more recent work shows that this is not necessarily the case [36, 131] and that issues such as the relative costs of communication and computation are important factors. Moreover, in some cases, applications using DSM can execute faster than equivalent message-passing ones [177], even when the DSM ...