PastSet - A distributed structured shared memory system

Abstract

The architecture and performance of a structured distributed shared memory system, PastSet, is described. The PastSet abstraction allows programmers to write applications that run efficiently on different architectures from four-way SMP nodes to larger clusters. PastSet is a tuple-based three dimensional structured distributed shared memory system, which provides the programmer with operations to perform causally ordered reads and writes of tuples to a virtual structured memory space called the PastSet. PastSet is specially implemented to utilize physical shared memory where available and distributed memory otherwise. The contribution of the PastSet model is good performance combined with ease of programming new and porting existing applications. It has been show in that a shared memory version of PastSet is able to outperform System V IPC on the same platform, both multiprocessors and uni-processor systems. We have also previously shown that running on a cluster of multiprocessors, PastSet was able to outperform MPI and PVM when running real applications.