Run-Time Support for Distributed Sharing in Typed Languages

We present a new run-time system for typed programming languages that supports object sharing in a distributed system. The key insight in this system is that the ability to distinguish pointers from data at run-time enables efficient and transparent sharing of data with both fine-grained and coarse-grained access patterns. In contrast, conventional distributed shared memory (DSM) systems that support sharing of an untyped memory region are limited to providing only one granularity with good performance. This new run-time system, DOSA, provides a shared obce abstraction rather than a shared address space ion. Three key aspects of the design are: First, DOSA uses type information, in particular, the ability to unambiguously recognize references, to make fine-grained sharing efficient by supporting object granularity coherence. Second, DOSA aggregates the communication of objects, making coarse-grained sharing efficient. Third, DOSA uses a globally unique "handle" rather than a...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: LCR
• Authors: Y. Charlie Hu, Weimin Yu, Alan L. Cox, Dan S. Wallach, Willy Zwaenepoel
• Keywords: Coarse-grained Sharing, DOSA, LCR 2000, Sharing, System Software