Book Description

Abstract: "This paper reports our experience implementing the Blizzard fine-grain distributed shared memory system on a network of unmodified dual-processor workstations running a commercial operating system. The paper describes and measures: three fine-grain access control mechanisms (optimized software, commodity hardware, and custom hardware); a low-latency, user-level communication layer; kernel support in a commercial operating system; and techniques to exploit multiprocessor (SMP) nodes. The results show that a network of workstations can effectively support fine-grain shared memory, but that high performance requires either custom network hardware or custom coherence protocols."