On Using Reliable Network RAM in Networks of Workstations

File systems and databases usually make several synchronous disk write accesses in order to make sure that the disk always has a consistent view of their data, and that data can be recovered in the case of a system crash. Since synchronous disk operations are slow, some systems choose to employ asynchronous disk write operations, at the cost of low reliability: in case of a system crash all data that have not yet been written to disk are lost

The Implementation of Cashmere

Cashmere is a software distributed shared memory (SDSM) system designed for today's high-performance cluster architectures. These clusters typically consist of symmetric multiprocessors (SMPs) connected by a low-latency system area network. Cashmere introduces several novel techniques for delegating intra-node sharing to the hardware coherence mechanism available within the SMPs, and also for leveraging advanced network features such as remote memory access. The efficacy of the Cashmere design has been borne out through head-to-head comparisons with other well-known, mature SDSMs and with Cashmere variants that do not take advantage of the various hardware features. In this paper, we describe the implementation of the Cashmere SDSM. Our discussion is organized around the core components that comprise Cashmere. We discuss both component interactions and low-level implementation details. We hope this paper provides researchers with the background needed to modify and extend the Cashmere system