Supporting Shared Memory and Message Passing on Clusters of PCs with a SMiLE.

With the rise of fast interconnection technologies and new concepts to utilize them without operating system interaction (like VIA [4]), compute clusters are becoming increasingly commonplace. Most of the interconnection networks focus only on message passing as their prime programming model neglecting the large code basis for shared memory. However, by utilizing the Scalable Coherent Interface (SCI) [19] with its ability to transparently perform remote memory operations, it is possible to support both efficient message passing and transparent shared memory on one single platform. This introduces a previously unknown flexibility into the cluster architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]