Indigo: user-level support for building distributed shared abstractions

Distributed systems that consist of workstations connected by high performance interconnects offer computational power comparable to moderate size parallel machines. It is desirable that such workstation clusters can also be programmed the same way as shared memory machines. We develop a portable, user-level library, called Indigo, that can be used to program a variety of state sharing techniques. In particular, Indigo can be used to program DSM protocols as well as distributed shared abstractions where objects can be fragmented/replicated and consistency actions are customized according to application needs. We present an evaluation of Indigo by using its calls to implement a distributed shared memory system as well as shared abstractions for a number of applications.