The Dash project is building a prototype kernel for very large distributed systems (VLDS) of the future. This kernel is being used to experimentally validate and compare design components. DASH is investigating kernel architectures that exploit shared-memory multiprocessors by generating parallelism in the kernel, and that remove communication performance bottlenecks such as data copying in software. Both problems involve complex interactions of virtual memory, scheduling, and hardware architecture. Very high bandwidth wide-area networks to interconnect very large numbers of diverse nodes may be built in the future. The DASH project is an attempt to predict and influence the hardware and software environments of such networks.
