Parallel ray-tracing with a transactional DSM

Distributed shared memory (DSM) is a well-known alternative to explicit message passing and remote procedure call. Numerous DSM systems and consistency models have been proposed in the past. The Plurix project implements a DSM operating system (OS) storing data and code, within the DSM. Our DSM storage features a new consistency model (transactional consistency) combining restartable transactions with an optimistic synchronization scheme instead of relying on a hard to use weak consistency model. In this paper we evaluate our system for the first time with a real parallel application, a parallel ray-tracer. The measurements show that our DSM scales quite well for this application even though we are using a strong consistency model.