PastSet

Overview

Distributed Shared Memory is a popular approach to achieving best-of-both-worlds in parallel processing. On one hand we prefer distributed memory over shared memory, because distributed memory machines can be made much larger, and thus faster, than shared memory machines. On the other hand shared memory machines are far easier to program, thus a system that allows shared memory programs to execute on distributed memory architectures is highly attractive.

PastSet is a structured distributed shared memory system, which mean that memory is structured differently than the standard byte sequence we normally think of as memory, in the case of PastSet memory is modeled as tuples.

Other distributed shared memory systems has been based on tuples, the best known of these is Linda. PastSet contributes with a set of features that has not yet been seen in structured distributed memory systems. One feature is maintaining sequential order on operations on the tuple memory.

Details

A more detailed PastSet Introduction is available in the pyPastSet source code.