Séminaire REGAL
The Architecture of the DecentVM: Towards a decentralized virtual machine for many-core computing
Wednesday, June 29, 2011Annette Bieniusa, université de Freiburg (Allemagne)
Fully decentralized systems avoid bottlenecks and single points of failure. Thus, they can provide excellent scalability and very robust operation. The talks presents DecentVM, a fully decentralized, distributed virtual machine. In general, distributed operation in a partitioned global address space (PGAS) model is ensured via references that do not only map to local memory addresses, but also to node identifiers. Any memory access then comes with a latency whose extent depends on the memory's position in the memory hierarchy. These latencies are especially important with respect to memory consistency. Thus, the DecentVM has been especially designed as a platform for software transactional memory (STM) systems, but it also supports traditional lock based consistency via monitors. The talk will focus on DecentSTM, the STM layer of the system, and discuss how memory consistency is achieved with the multi-versioning scheme for objects.
Marc.Shapiro (at) nulllip6.fr