Virtual Shared Memory Programming on Workstation Clusters

Workstation clusters have recently attracted high interest as a technology providing supercomputer class performance at much lower price levels. Today the message passing programming model dominates the application development, despite the overhead and the complexity introduced by the explicitly coded data transfers. We give an introduction to the virtual shared memory programming model and report on the experiences with the MNFS system. We show that shared memory with weak coherency can perform competitive to message passing and provide an excellent tool for parallelizing programs using complex data structures with dynamic load balancing