Prior to this work, the notion of a page-based DSMs which use page protection mechanisms was perceived as contradicting that of sharing data in fine granularity, and tightly coupled with that of false-sharing. Although relaxed consistency memories are successful in solving the problem, they require complicated protocols which introduce new sources of overhead.
In this paper we proposed a new method, called MULTIVIEW, that unbinds the (seemingly) tight connection between page-based DSMs and the need to share data in granularity of pages. We describe one realization of MULTIVIEW in a DSM system called MILLIPAGE. In addition to the MULTIVIEW implementation, the design of MILLIPAGE gives rise to other important issues such as the notion of a thin-layer DSM and the integration of fast messaging layers.
The MULTIVIEW technique and its implementation in MILLIPAGE open a new avenue of research directions. Work in these directions is already under way. We proceed in this section to mention only a few of them.