Summary: Indigo: User­level Support for Building Distributed
Shared Abstractions \Lambda
Prince Kohli
Mustaque Ahamad y
Karsten Schwan
College of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology
June 12, 1996
Abstract
Distributed systems that consist of workstations connected by high performance in­
terconnects offer computational power comparable to moderate size parallel machines.
Middleware like Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) or Distributed Shared Objects
(DSO) attempts to improve the programmability of such hardware by presenting to
application programmers interfaces similar to those offered by shared memory ma­
chines. This paper presents the portable Indigo data sharing library which provides a
small set of primitives with which arbitrary shared abstractions are easily and efficiently
implemented across distributed hardware platforms. Sample shared abstractions im­
plemented with Indigo include DSM as well as fragmented objects, where object state
is split across different machines and where inter­fragment communications may be
customized to application­specific consistency needs. The Indigo library's design and

Source: Ahamad, Mustaque - College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences