Despite being a powerful concept, distributed shared memory (DSM) has not been made practical due to the extensive synchronization needed between servers to implement memory coherence. This paper shows a practical DSM implementation based on the insight that the ownership model embedded in programming languages such as Rust automatically constrains the order of read and write, providing opportunities for significantly simplifying the coherence implementation if the ownership semantics can be exposed to and leveraged by the runtime. This paper discusses the design and implementation of DistR, a Rust-based DSM system that outperforms the two state-of-the-art DSM systems GAM and Grappa by up to 2.64x and 29.16x in throughput, and scales much better with the number of servers.
@article{arxiv.2406.02803,
title = {DRust: Language-Guided Distributed Shared Memory with Fine Granularity, Full Transparency, and Ultra Efficiency},
author = {Haoran Ma and Yifan Qiao and Shi Liu and Shan Yu and Yuanjiang Ni and Qingda Lu and Jiesheng Wu and Yiying Zhang and Miryung Kim and Harry Xu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.02803},
year = {2024}
}