A Distributed Shared Memory Experiment Using a Dedicated Gigabit Wide Area Network

摘要

Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) has many advantages in heterogeneous environments, such as geographically distant clusters or the Grid. These include locality utilization and replication transparency. The fact that processes communicate indirectly through memory rather than directly, is giving DSM these advantages. This paper describes a DSM experiment targeted at a small grid environment. This environment consists of two geographically distant clusters located in Scandinavia. All inter-cluster communication go through a dedicated gigabit line that is about 300km (186 miles) long. The DSM system named Global PastSet (GPS) [1] has been used in this experiment. GPS has been specially designed for grid environments, by means of locality utilization, replication and the ability to migrate consistency control.