MultiView and Millipage — fine-grain sharing in page-based DSMs

In this paper we develop a novel technique, called MultiView, which enables implementation of page-based #ne-grain dsms. We show how the traditional techniques for implementing page-based dsms can be extended to control the sharing granularityina #exible way,even when the size of the sharing unit varies, and is smaller than the operating systems page size. The run-time overhead imposed in the proposed technique is negligible. We presentadsm system, called millipage, which builds upon MultiView in order to support sharing in variable-size units. millipage e#ciently implements Sequential Consistency and shows comparable #sometimes superior# performance to related systems which use relaxed consistency models. It uses standard userlevel operating system api and requires no compiler intervention, page twinning, di#s, code instrumentation, or sophisticated protocols. The resulting system is a #thin software layer consisting mainly of a simple, #clean protocol that handles page-faults. 1 I...