Technique for referencing distributed shared memory locally rather than remotely

摘要

The invention comprises a technique for allocating memory in a multiprocessing computing system. In a first aspect, a method in accordance with the present invention begins by collecting a plurality of descriptions of shared data items. The shared data items are then dynamically allocated into a local virtual address space shared by a plurality of CPUs within a single node. The description of this allocation is the then stored. The method then accesses the stored allocation description to determine the virtual memory address of a shared data item. Whenever a data request is generated, it is determined from this virtual memory address whether the shared data item is available within the shared local virtual address space. If so, the access is performed in the shared local virtual address space. If the data is unavailable in the local virtual address space, it is accessed from a remote memory space.