Adsmith: an efficient object-based distributed shared memory system on PVM

In this paper, we describe an object-based distributed shared memory called Adsmith. In an object-based DSM, the shared memory consists of many shared objects, through which the shared memory is accessed. Adsmith is built on top of PVM at the library layer using C++. PVM is used as the communication subsystem, because it is a de facto standard and encapsulates many system related details. Several mechanisms are used to improve the performance of Adsmith, such as release memory consistency, load/store-like memory accesses, nonblocking accesses, and atomic operations, etc. Performance results show that even though Adsmith is implemented on top of PVM, programs running on Adsmith can achieve a performance comparable with those running directly on PVM.