Abstract

The HP Labs MultiComputer Systems (MCS) project is investigating issues involved in writing applications for a shared memory multicomputer, defined as a set of independent computing nodes coupled through access to Global Shared Memory (GSM). MCS is an architecture specification and prototype implementation of a shared memory multicomputer. The prototype platform is based on a commercially available ccNUMA machine comprised of 4 SMP nodes. MCS leverages commodity operating systems with few or no changes; the prototype runs an unmodified Windows NT 4.0 operating system on all nodes, extended through dynamically loaded kernel modules to support multicomputer interfaces.

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