Design of the Munin Distributed Shared Memory System
John B. Carter
Department of Computer Science
University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84112
Abstract
Software distributed shared memory (DSM) is a software abstraction of
shared memory on a distributed memory machine. The key problem in
building an efficient DSM system is to reduce the amount of communication
needed to keep the distributed memories consistent. The Munin DSM system
incorporates a number of novel techniques for doing so, including the use
of multiple consistency protocols and support for multiple concurrent
writer protocols. Due to these, and other, features, Munin is able to
achieve high performance on a variety of numerical applications. This
paper contains a detailed description of the design and implementation
of the Munin prototype, with special emphasis given to its novel
write shared protocol. Furthermore, it describes a number of
lessons that we learned from our experience with the prototype
implementation that are relevant to the implementation of future DSM's.
Full paper appeared in Journal of
Parallel and Distributed Computing, September 1995.