Broadcast distributed shared memory

Using the hardware broadcast capability of Ethernet networks, we have developed a distributed shared memory system that provides fine-grained sharing with an extremely simple protocol. The system broadcasts buffered updates of local writes to other processes to disseminate data. Our system provides a memory coherence model that is sufficiently strong to allow correct executions of many programs, but weak enough to to use a simple, efficient protocol. We have developed a suite of parallel programs using our DSM systems. We compare the performance of our programs to similar programs on a common message-passing alternative, MPI. Our results show that, while performance is comparable in most cases, there are applications which run faster on our DSM system than using MPI.