A library-based distributed shared memory system
Andrew J. Weber · 1999
Distributed computing systems made up of a collection of computers require effective communication between the participating computers. The two fundamental models of communication are the message passing model and the shared memory model. The shared memory model can be further broken down into hardware-based, page-based, and library-based implementations. The Network Chunk System implements a library-based shared memory model of communication using IP multicast as the underlying transport. NCS provides for several dynamically configurable data replication behaviors. Each named data element, or chunk, may be configured to be replicated in any one of the supported ways at any given time. Beowulf and Network of Workstations clusters currently have several message passing model implementations to choose from such as PVM and MPI/LAM. Beowulf clusters also have page-based shared memory models such as the ZOUNDS based implementation from Sarnoff and a package being implemented by Jason Crawford. NCS provides a library-based shared memory model implementation which provides a different approach to the already available message passing and page-based shared memory options. This paper presents the overall design of NCS and introductory guide to using NCS.