The design of user-level distributed shared memory system in SCI-based clusters

In this paper, we study how to design a user-level DSM system. that can achieve high performance based on SCI-based cluster. We focus on two main issues: message passing primitive and distributed shared memory protocols. For message passing, we implement Active Message [12], since it is a lour-overhead message layer which can be and often is, used to support other protocols. To study distributed shared memory protocols, we implement a CRL-like DSM, which provides a global address space and some collective communication functions. Our experience shows that SCI-based interconnects are good alternatives for building high-performance, low-cost shared memory clusters.