PermaNT: Persistent Shared Memory for Windows NT/2000 Clusters

摘要

This paper examines a new architecture for cluster-based shared memory parallel computing on networks of industry-standard workstations. Traditionally, such software distributed shared memory systems have been implemented as a user-level library that is linked statically or dynamically with a shared memory application. The library provides the abstraction of shared memory, relieving the application programmer from the burden of explicitly moving data between nodes in the systems. The PermaNT system represents a departure from these systems in that a single instance of the shared memory runtime system hosts multiple applications simultaneously, resulting in lower application initialization overhead, more balanced resource usage, reduced system management, and improved support for fault tolerance. This paper examines the proposed architecture of the PermaNT system.