IVY: a shared virtual memory system for parallel computing

A shared-virtual-memory system is described which can provide a virtual address space shared among all processors in a loosely-coupled multiprocessor. It is shown that such a memory can solve many problems in message-passing systems on loosely-coupled multiprocessors. The design and implementation are described of a prototype shared-virtual-memory system, IVY, implemented on an Apollo ring network. The experiments on the prototype system show that parallel programs using a shared virtual memory yield almost linear and ocassionally superlinear speedups and that it is practical to implement such a system on existing architectures.