Research on Distributed Shared Memory System with High Speed Network

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In recent years CPU of workstations and networks have made a rapid progress in performance, and it is now recognized useful to use clusters of workstations connected with high speed commodity network as virtual parallel computers. The objective of this research project is construction of a shared memory system as the programming environment of workstation cluster. The ordinary message passing interface requires considerable efforts of programmers. If we construct a virtual shared memory system on clusters of workstations, the programmer sees a single memory address space and complexity of parallel programming is reduced greatly. In this project we have implemented a software distributed shared memory system(DSM) which has high software portability. In our design PVM is used the network interface and software DSM is implemented with the Split-C programming language model(I). Different from the case of hardware DSMs, software DSM must pay a considerable performance penalties and we devised a software cache system as the runtime library and succeeded in improving performance of software DSM (II). The cache system is a rather simple system based on Read-Only Cache and a reasonable performance was attained in our experiments(III). We carried out trend analysis of research activities in DSM using INSPEC database and also investigated theoretical study in parallel programming language systems.