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ASPLOS
1996
ACM

Shasta: A Low Overhead, Software-Only Approach for Supporting Fine-Grain Shared Memory

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Shasta: A Low Overhead, Software-Only Approach for Supporting Fine-Grain Shared Memory
This paper describes Shasta, a system that supports a shared address space in software on clusters of computers with physically distributed memory. A unique aspect of Shasta compared to most other software distributed shared memory systems is that shared data can be kept coherent at a fine granularity. In addition, the system allows the coherence granularity to vary across different shared data structures in a single application. Shasta implements the shared address space by transparently rewriting the application executable to intercept loads and stores. For each shared load or store, the inserted code checks to see if the data is available locally and communicates with other processors if necessary. The system uses numerous techniques to reduce the run-time overhead of these checks. Since Shasta is implemented entirely in software, it also provides tremendous flexibility in supporting different types of cache coherence protocols. We have implemented an efficient cache coherence prot...
Daniel J. Scales, Kourosh Gharachorloo, Chandramoh
Added 08 Aug 2010
Updated 08 Aug 2010
Type Conference
Year 1996
Where ASPLOS
Authors Daniel J. Scales, Kourosh Gharachorloo, Chandramohan A. Thekkath
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