Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) is a technology to update a remote machine’s memory without intervention at the receiver
side. We evaluate where RDMA can be usefully applied and where it is a loss in Object-Oriented DSM systems. RDMA is difficult
to use in modern OO-DSMs due to their support for large address spaces, advanced protocols, and heterogeneity. First, a communication
pattern that is based on objects reduces the applicability of bulk RDMA. Second, large address spaces (meaning far larger
than that of a single machine) and large numbers of machines require an address space translation scheme to map an object
at different addresses on different machines. Finally, RDMA usage is hard since without polling (which would require source
code modifications), incoming RDMA messages are hard to notice on time.
Our results show that even with RDMA, update protocols are slower than invalidation protocols. But RDMA can be successfully
applied to fetching of objects in an invalidation protocol and improves performance by 20.6%.