Parallel computing with distributed shared data

Summary form only given. The issue of ease of using shared data in a data-intensive parallel computing environment is discussed. An approach is investigated for transparently supporting data sharing in a loosely coupled parallel computing environment, where a moderate to a large number of individual computing elements are connected via a high-bandwidth network without necessarily physically sharing memory. A system called VOYAGER is discussed which serves as the underlying system facility that supervises the distributed shared virtual memory. VOYAGER allows shared-data parallel applications to take advantage of parallel and distributed processing with relative ease. The application program merely maps the shared data onto its virtual address space replicates itself on distributed machines and spawns appropriate execution threads; the threads would automatically be given coordinated access to the shared data distributed in the network. Multiple computation threads migrate and populate the processors of a number of computing elements, making use of the multiple processors to achieve a high degree of parallelism. The low-level resource management chores are made available once and for all in the underlying facility VOYAGER, usable by many different data-intensive applications