Description
Tarmac is a language system substrate on which systems for distributed parallel programming can be built. Tarmac provides a model of shared global state called mobile memory. The basic unit of state in this model can be viewed as both 1) a block of memory that can be directly accessed by machine instructions, and 2) a logical entity with a globally unique name that may be efficiently located, copied and moved. To support higher-level synchronization models, the movement of a memory unit may optionally enable computations.
Mobile memory is more flexible than models such as distributed virtual memory, shared tuple space, or distributed objects. It avoids the limitations of fixed page size, fixed data placement policy, and type-system or language dependence. This flexibility allows Tarmac to support a wide range of parallel programming models efficiently.