Mether: supporting the shared memory model on computing clusters

Mether, a distributed shared memory (DSM) that runs under the SunOS 4.0 operating system, is described. Mether provides a shared memory space for computers connected via a network such as Ethernet. User programs access the Mether address space as they do any other memory. Mether provides extensions...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Minnich, R.G., Pryor, D.V.
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Subjects:
Application software
Assembly
Computer networks
Distributed computing
File systems
Operating systems
Sun
Supercomputers
Time sharing computer systems
Trademarks
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Summary:Mether, a distributed shared memory (DSM) that runs under the SunOS 4.0 operating system, is described. Mether provides a shared memory space for computers connected via a network such as Ethernet. User programs access the Mether address space as they do any other memory. Mether provides extensions to support efficient synchronization and utilization of the computers in the network. The most recent version of Mether is implemented via a modified NFS system, called MNFS (for Mether-NFS); this system supports a DSM as part of the file system space, while significantly improving the consistency semantics of NFS. One parallel application run on a cluster of SPARCStations is a Monte Carlo radiative heat transfer simulation. The performance achieved on the cluster was within an order of magnitude of the performance one would expect to achieve on a 16-processor model of the C90 supercomputer.< >
DOI:10.1109/CMPCON.1993.289734