Shadow Stacks-a hardware-supported DSM for objects of any granularity

Abstract

This paper presents a new Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) management concept that is integrated into a scalable distributed virtual memory management technique and circumvents false sharing while still preserving simplicity to the application level. Objects defined as usual by variables in the declaration part of functions are made sharable among threads executing in the distributed environment. These objects of varying granularity and with different consistency requirements are managed separately to avoid false sharing. Consistency is enforced at runtime by a distributed manager-agent architecture, that supports automatic and dynamic selection of an adequate coherence protocol per object. To provide efficiency, the implementation of the Shadow Stacks concept is based on the exploitation of the page fault mechanism provided by of the shelf hardware.