Implementation of PVM-based distributed shared memory system

This paper describes the design and the implementation of Split-C/PVM, a distributed shared memory (DSM) system on clusters of personal computers and workstations. Split-C/PVM employs the PVM as the underlying communication support to enhance its portability. The system implements asynchronous remote memory accesses through the UNIX signals to avoid continuous polling. A global address in the DSM system is specified by the processor ID it belongs to and the local address within the processor. Thus, the physical location of the data at a given global address is efficiently identified in a portable manner. A simple software-managed cache system has been. implemented to reduce the cost of global memory accesses. Our preliminary results indicate the efficiency of the implementation.