A Comparison Of Two Paradigms For Distributed Shared Memory

• Main Authors: Willem G. Levelt, M. Frans Kaashoek, Henri E. Bal, Andrew S. Tanenbaum
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 1992
• Subjects: Orca
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.37.8234

This paper compares two paradigms for Distributed Shared Memory on loosely coupled computing systems: the shared data-object model as used in Orca, a programming language specially designed for loosely coupled computing systems and the Shared Virtual Memory model. For both paradigms two systems are described, one using only point-to-point messages, the other using broadcasting as well. The two paradigms and their implementations are described briefly. Their performances on four applications are compared: the travelling-salesman problem, alpha-beta search, matrix multiplication and the all-pairs shortest paths problem. The relevant measurements were obtained on a system consisting of 10 MC68020 processors connected by an Ethernet. For comparison purposes, the applications have also been run on a system with physical shared memory. In addition, the paper gives measurements for the first two applications above when Remote Procedure Call is used as the communication mechanism. The measurem.