Distributed shared memory: where we are and where we should be headed

It has been almost ten years since the birth of the first distributed shared memory (DSM) system, Ivy. While significant progress has been made in the area of improving the performance of DSM, and DSM has been the focus of several dozen PhD theses, its overall impact on “real” users and applications has been small. The goal of this paper is to present our position on what remains to be done before DSM will have a significant impact on real applications. More specifically, we reflect on what we believe have been the major advances in the area, what the important outstanding problems are, and what work needs to be done. Finally, we describe a modest step towards solving these problems, the Quarks DSM system