A DSM-based portable distributed programming testbed
R. K. Hariram, Timothy A. Gonsalves · 1995
For interprocess communication, Shared Memory is a simpler and more transparent programming paradigm than Message Passing. Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) is an abstraction of shared memory on distributed computers having no physically shared memory. This paper presents the design and implementation of a completely user-level DSM system on top of Unix. Our testbed uses only System V shared memory IPC, Berkeley sockets and Unix’s signal handling facility. The developed testbed is highly portable because all these facilities are now supported by almost all Unix systems. As the testbed is fully user-level it can be used for testing various DSM algorithms. Currently, it supports two consistency algorithms. We have also implemented distributed semaphores and distributed barriers for synchronization of distributed processes. We evaluate our testbed using a set of applications taken from different fields including applications from the SPLASH (Stanford Parallel Applications for Shared Memory) suite. These experiments show close to linear speedup in many cases. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.