Shmem

• Shmem is a distributed memory access library

• It does put and get to multiple memory “images”

• Communication is processor-to-memory rather than processor-to-processor or thread-to-thread

  • an image can easily support multiple threads per image

    • allowing SMP nodes with multiple threads per processor
  • the threads can be nameless

    • greatly facilitating dynamic scheduling

• Synchronization is memory-based

  • or a system-wide barrier

• Most multiprocessor vendors are implementing it

• Unfortunately, shmem is pretty low-level

Previous slide

Next slide

Back to first slide

View graphic version