Teamster: a transparent distributed shared memory for cluster symmetric multiprocessors

Abstract

Teamster is a transparent DSM system built on a cluster of symmetric x86 multiprocessors connected with 100 Mb Fast Ethernet. Teamster has a hybrid thread architecture so that a programmer can parallelize the application without concerning the underlying hardware configuration. The Global Memo Image of Teamster provides a truly global and synchronization objects are put into GMI. Because we declare and initialize these data and objects in the beginning, the linker of the operating system helps us forming this and need explicit annotations to propagate the modification of global static variables. With the support of the hybrid thread architecture and Global Memory Image, Teamster can provide a truly transparent DSM in the cluster of SSMP computers. More than that, the overhead of creating more application threads and supporting the Global Memory Image does not affect the performance of Teamster in our measurement.