USENIX ATC '24 and OSDI '24

Haoran Ma, Yifan Qiao, Shi Liu, and Shan Yu, UCLA; Yuanjiang Ni, Qingda Lu, and Jiesheng Wu, Alibaba Group; Yiying Zhang, UCSD; Miryung Kim and Harry Xu, UCLA

Despite being a powerful concept, distributed shared memory (DSM) has not been made practical due to the extensive synchronization needed between servers to implement memory coherence. This paper shows a practical DSM implementation based on the insight that the ownership model embedded in programming languages such as Rust automatically constrains the order of read and write, providing opportunities for significantly simplifying the coherence implementation if the ownership semantics can be exposed to and leveraged by the runtime. This paper discusses the design and implementation of DRust, a Rust-based DSM system that outperforms the two state-of-the-art DSM systems GAM and Grappa by up to 2.64× and 29.16× in throughput, and scales much better with the number of servers.

https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi24/presentation/ma-haoran