KOAN: a Shared Virtual Memory for the iPSC/2 hypercube

. In this paper, we describe the salient features of an implementation of a shared virtual memory (SVM), named KOAN, running on an iPSC/2 hypercube. A SVM provides to the user an abstraction from an underlying memory architecture. A SVM is a virtual address space that is shared by a number of processes running on different processors of a distributed memory parallel computer. This concept allows the user to program his application without explicit message passing. The performances of our SVM are given as well as some preliminary results on a parallel matrix multiply algorithm. 1 Introduction Programming distributed memory parallel computers (DMPC) using a Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) seems to be in fashion. However, there is few operating systems available for DMPCs which implements such concept. Most of the implementations of shared virtual memory have been done for networks of workstations, one can cite IVY [8], Gothic [10, 15, 13], Clouds [14], Munin [3], Memnet [5], Mach [17] and C..