Implementing distributed shared memory on top of MPI: the DSMPI library

Distributed shared memory has been recognized as an alternative programming model to exploit the parallelism in distributed memory systems since it provides a higher level of abstraction than simple message passing. DSM combines the simple programming model of shared-memory with the scalability of distributed memory machines. This paper presents DSMPI, a parallel library that runs atop of MPI and provides a distributed shared memory abstraction. It provides an easy-to-use programming interface, is flexible, portable and supports heterogeneity. Moreover, it supports different coherence protocols and models of consistency. We present some performance results taken in a network of workstations and in a Cray T3D which show that DSMPI can be competitive with MPI for some applications.