The Amber system: parallel programming on a network of multiprocessors

  • Authors:

  • J. Chase;F. Amador;E. Lazowska;H. Levy;R. Littlefield

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA

  • Venue:
  • SOSP '89 Proceedings of the twelfth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
  • Year:
  • 1989

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Abstract

This paper describes a programming system called Amber that permits a single application program to use a homogeneous network of computers in a uniform way, making the network appear to the application as an integrated multiprocessor. Amber is specifically designed for high performance in the case where each node in the network is a shared-memory multiprocessor.Amber shows that support for loosely-coupled multiprocessing can be efficiently realized using an object-based programming model. Amber programs execute in a uniform network-wide object space, with memory coherence maintained at the object level. Careful data placement and consistency control are essential for reducing communication overhead in a loosely-coupled system. Amber programmers use object migration primitives to control the location of data and processing.