Shared Virtual Memory: A Simple Model for Implementing Distributed Applications

We first describe the design and implementation f a distributed shared memory system for a cluster of Sun workstations We then present performance results for a simple para lel application and show that distributed shared memory is competitive with direct use of message passing The factors affecting SVM performance are also studied. The rest of the paper focuses on our current research into extending the shared memory model to h terogeneous systems, which is believed to offer substantial performance benefits as well as a number of chal-lenging problems. We identify some of these problems, and propose solutions to one of them.