F. Dehne, W. Dittrich, D. Hutchinson, and A. Maheshwari, Parallel
Virtual Memory, Proc. 10th Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete
Algorithms (SODA'99), Baltimore, Maryland January 1999, pp. 889-890.
Parallel algorithms for the Bulk Synchronous Parallel (BSP) and closely
related Coarse Gained Multicomputer (CGM) programming model assume that
all data can be distributed over the main memories of the processors involved.
In practice, this may not be the case. For large scale applications where
parallel processing is helpful, the total amount of data often exceeds
the total main memory available and parallel disk I/O becomes a necessity.
A common scenario for distributed memory parallel machines assumes that
each processor has multiple local hard disks available, where each disk
is only accessible by the respective local processor. Parallel disk I/O
has been identified as a critical component of a suitable high performance
computer for a number of the Grand Challenge problems (see for instance
the Scalable I/O Initiative project). For sequential computing, the virtual
memory concept has long been established as a standard method for managing
external memory. Its main advantage is that it allows the application programmer
to access a large virtual memory without having to deal with the intricacies
of blocked secondary memory accesses. We present a similar, transparent,
parallel virtual memory programming environment for BSP-style parallel
computing.