Software distributed shared memory (DSM) may support various existing networks of workstations and distributed memory machines built from commodity or customized microprocessors and networks, without any hardware added. In order for DSM to be employed in long-running applications or high-availability situations, reconfiguration in response to processor failures or resource changes is crucial and inevitable. From the performance standpoint, a software-based DSM system ought to minimize its coherence traffic overhead, because such a system is especially sensitive to the traffic amount over the network.This research proposal focuses on reconfiguration and performance issues in software DSM under release consistency, aiming to render such DSM a favorable computing paradigm.The key objectives of this research include: (1) pursuing efficient algorithms for identifying target structures in distributed systems under reconfiguration, (2) investigating process migration by taking advantage of multiple disjoint paths, (3) developing a recoverable software DSM system based on fast checkpointing, (4) investigating into aggressive implementations of release consistency for software DSM, and (5) pursuing efficient barrier and lock techniques for software DSM.
