Experiences with the Mether-NFS virtual shared memory system

Abstract

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