Adsmith: an object-based distributed shared memory system for networks of workstations
Wen Yew Liang, Chung Ta King, Feipei Lai · 1997
This paper introduces an object-based distributed shared memory (DSM) system called Adsmith. The primary goal of Adsmith is to provide a low-cost, portable, and efficient DSM for networks of workstations (NOW). Adsmith achieves this goal by building on top of PVM, a widely supported communication subsystem, as a user-level library and by incorporating many traffic reduction and latency hiding techniques. Issues involved in the design of Adsmith and our solution strategies will be discussed. Preliminary performance evaluation of Adsmith on a network of Pentium computers will be presented. The results show that programs developed with Adsmith can achieve a performance comparable to that developed with PVM. 1 Introduction For ease of construction and high scalability, many high performance parallel computers today are built as distributed memory systems. In such systems, message passing is the most natural programming paradigm. With message passing, however, programmers are forced to ma...