Active Containers: A Toolkit for Distributed Shared Memory

Numerous protocols have been designed to implement memory coherency on clusters. The majority of these approaches support multiple readers and multiple writers accessing shared memory. By weakening this constraint we have designed and implemented a high performance, relatively transparent toolkit for multiple reader, single writer shared objects. The toolkit achieves a high degree of performance by using our implementation of Active Messages 2 to update copies of shared objects. Other key aspects of our design include function shipping and a lazy evaluation of updates.