Distributed Shared Memory In Global Area Networks

摘要

Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) has many advantages in heterogeneous environments, such as geographically distant clusters or The Grid. These includes: locality utilization and replication transparency. The fact that processes communicate indirectly through memory rather than directly, is giving DSM these advantages. This paper presents the design of Global PastSet (GPS) which is a DSM system targeted at global area networks. GPS is based on the DSM system PastSet [1] that has been very effective in homogeneous cluster environments. GPS utilizes consistency control migration and replication to scale in heterogeneous environments. This has resulted in a token-based mutual exclusion algorithm that considers locality and an algorithm for locating replicas. GPS has been simulated in multi-cluster environments with up to 2048 nodes with very promising results.