Indigo: User-level Support for Building Distributed Shared Abstractions

ions Prince Kohli Mustaque Ahamad Karsten Schwan GIT--ICS--94/53 Revised October 27, 1995 Abstract Distributed systems that consist of workstations connected by high performance interconnects offer computational power comparable to moderate size parallel machines. Middleware like Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) or Distributed Shared Objects (DSO) attempts to improve the programmability of such hardware by presenting to application programmers interfaces similar to those offered by shared memory machines. This paper presents the portable Indigo communications library which provides a small set of primitives with which arbitrary shared abstractions are easily and efficiently implemented across distributed hardware platforms. Sample shared abstractions implemented with Indigo include DSM and a variety of DSM protocols as well as fragmented objects, where object state is split across different machines and where fragment communications may be customized to application-specific consist..