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 fine-grain DSMs. We show how the traditional techniques for implementing page-based DSMs can be extended to control the sharing granularity in a flexible way, even when the size of the sharing unit varies, and is smaller than the operating system's page size. The run-time overhead imposed in the proposed technique is negligible. We present a DSM system, called MILLIPAGE, which builds upon MULTIVIEW in order to support sharing in variable-size units. MILLIPAGE efficiently implements Sequential Consistency and shows comparable (sometimes superior) performance to related systems which use relaxed consistency models. It uses standard user-level operating system API and requires no compiler intervention, page twinning, diffs, code instrumentation, or sophisticated protocols. The resulting system is a thin software layer consisting mainly of a simple, clean protocol that handles page-faults.