DSVM6K: distributed shared virtual memory on the risc system/6000

Abstract

This paper describes DSVM6K, an implementation of distributed shared virtual memory in AIX v3 on the IBM RISC System/6000 workstation. The design and implementation exploits the high-speed fiber links and low-overhead link protocols on the RISC System/6000 workstation. The results demonstrate that technology like this is required for a high performance DSVM system. DSVM6K achieves the highest performance of any DSVM system reported in the literature. The paper contains descriptions of the overall design, programming interfaces, performance measurement data and application results. DSVM6K is a part of a larger research effort on parallel numerically intensive computing using the shared memory programming paradigm.