Experiences with the Mether-NFS virtual shared memory system

Workstation clusters have recently attracted high interest as a technology providing supercomputer class performance at much lower price levels. The message passing programming model dominates the application development, despite the overhead and the complexity introduced by the explicitly coded synchronisation and data transfers. We give an introduction to the virtual shared memory programming model and report on the experiences with an implementation running on an FDDI network with 8 machines. We show that the direct coherence control mechanisms provided by the Mether-NFS system can be used to overcome the false sharing overhead caused by the coherency protocol. They provide an excellent tool for parallelizing programs using complex data structures with dynamic load balancing. (orig.)Available from TIB Hannover: RO 3476(152) / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekSIGLEDEGerman

Netzinstallation von Solaris 2.3 ueber Subnetzgrenzen hinweg

Available from TIB Hannover: RO 3476(164) / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekSIGLEDEGerman

Shared memory programming on the Meiko CS-2

A interesting feature of some recent parallel computers is the fact that the underlying transport mechanism behind the currently dominating message passing interfaces is based on a global address space model. By accessing this global adress space directly most of the inherent delays for administering message buffers and queues can be avoided. Using this interface we have implemented a user level distributed shared memory layer using the virtual memory protection mechanisms of the operating system. The synchronisation required for maintaining the coherency of the memory is addressed by implementing a distributed shared lock which exploits the remote atomic store operations provided by the Meiko CS-2. This allows an asynchronous stype of programming where the load is dynamically distributed over the nodes of a parallel partition. (orig.)SIGLEAvailable from TIB Hannover: RO 3476(180) / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekDEGerman