Paving the way for Distributed Non-Blocking Algorithms and Data Structures in the Partitioned Global Address Space
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The partitioned global address space has bridged the gap between shared and distributed memory, and with this bridge comes the ability to adapt shared memory concepts, such as non-blocking programming, to distributed systems such as supercomputers. To enable non-blocking algorithms, we present ways to perform scalable atomic operations on objects in remote memory via remote direct memory address and pointer compression. As a solution to the problem of concurrent-safe reclamation of memory in a distributed system, we adapt Epoch-Based Memory Reclamation to distributed memory and implement it in such a way to support global-view programming. This construct is designed and implemented for the Chapel programming language, but can be adapted and generalized to work on other languages and libraries.
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