Efficient Global Pointers With Spontaneous Process Migration

We present an approach to implementing and using global pointers in a distributed computing environment. The programmer is able to create pointer-based distributed data structures, which can then be used by sequential or parallel programs without having to differentiate between local and global pointers. Any reference to a remote address causes the process to either migrate to the remote host, where it continues its execution, or to perform a remote access operation. The decision is made automatically and fully transparently to the programmer. By using a hardware-supported memory checking mechanism, we avoid any overhead associated with the detection of remote references.