Advances in optical networking technology provide the network withunique storage capabilities enabling the creation of a physical sharedmemory in a wide area distributed system. This has implications on theoverall systems' architecture as well as on the host. From the userperspective the end-system will be shaped by the application and becomea global distributed shared-memory multiprocessor. In this paper wepropose a memory building block based on optical networking technologythat we further use in devising a multiprocessor host architecture. Ahierarchical memory architecture that ensures scalability and allowsmultiple copies of a shared object is adopted. The architecture favourshardware solutions for enforcing cache coherence by exploiting theintrinsic broadcast capability of the new memory module. Theinterprocess communication system suitable for such an environment isanalysed in order to achieve functional transparency for applicationsported from a multicomputer to a multiprocessor, and issues related toperformance transparency when dealing with long light-propagationlatency are addressed. With this processing-communication paradigm, thehost-network interface simply provides a direct path between thehost-memory and the external network-memory
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