A Comprehensive Bibliography of Distributed Shared Memory

M. Rasit Eskicioglu
Department of Computer Science
University of New Orleans
New Orleans, LA 70148
rasit@cs.uno.edu

Shared memory is an attractive programming model for designing parallel and distributed applications. In the past decade, a popular research topic has been the design of systems to provide the shared memory abstraction on physically distributed memory machines. This abstraction is commonly known as Distributed Shared Memory (DSM). DSM has been implemented both in software (e.g., to provide the shared memory programming model on networks of workstations) and in hardware (e.g., using cache consistency protocols to support shared memory across physically distributed main memories). This bibliography identifies the results of research on DSM and related topics.

In this bibliography, we broadly classify papers describing previous DSM research into the following eight categories:

DSM concepts and origins,
Consistency models,
Memory coherence protocols and algorithms,
Hardware implementations of DSM,
Software implementations of DSM,
Language support for DSM (including support for distributed shared objects),
Related issues (e.g., synchronization, fault tolerance, heterogeneity, and persistence),
Miscellaneous (papers that do not fall into the previous categories, e.g., surveys and performance evaluation.)

Determining the most appropriate classification for existing DSM research was a difficult task and placing papers into a single category often required making fairly arbitrary decisions. Each paper was placed into the category for which the author felt was most relevant to the work described in that paper---the author apologizes in advance to researchers who feel that their work was incorrectly categorized or omitted entirely. Feedback is greatly appreciated.

Acknowledgments: The author wishes to thank Professors Les Keedy of the University of Ulm, Germany and John Carter of the University of Utah for their valuable comments on the presentation of this paper and for their help identifying missing references in the original draft. Professor Keedy provided the author with the full citations and copies of a few of the missing references. Professor Carter helped the author in determining better classification of some references.

BibTeX version ( 472 entries) of the complete bibliography and gzipped postscript version ( 34 pages, including some blank pages for double-sided printing) of this report are also available.
Please note that the number of entries in the bibliography and the number of pages in the technical report are subject to change as both files are updated periodically.

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