S. Frenz, Distributed Syst. Dept., Ulm Univ., Germany
Distributed shared memory (DSM) is a well-known alternative to explicit message passing and remote procedure call. Numerous DSM systems and consistency models have been proposed in the past. The Plurix project implements a DSM operating system (OS) storing data and code, within the DSM. Our DSM storage features a new consistency model (transactional consistency) combining restartable transactions with an optimistic synchronization scheme instead of relying on a hard to use weak consistency model. In this paper we evaluate our system for the first time with a real parallel application, a parallel ray-tracer. The measurements show that our DSM scales quite well for this application even though we are using a strong consistency model.
Citation:
S. Frenz, M. Schoettner, R. Goeckelmann, P. Schulthess, "Parallel ray-tracing with a transactional DSM," ccgrid, pp.475-481, Fourth IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGrid'04), 2004