One way to provide fault isolation among cooperating software modules is to place each in its own address space. However, for tightly-coupled modules, this solution incurs prohibitive context switch overhead. In this paper, we present a software approach to implementing fault isolation within a single address space. Our approach has two parts. First, we load the code and data for a distrusted module into its own fault domain, a logically separate portion of the application's address space. Second, we modify the object code of a distrusted module to prevent it from writing or jumping to an address outside its fault domain. Both these software operations are portable and programming language independent. Our approach poses a tradeo relative to hardware fault isolation: substantially faster communication between fault domains, at a cost of slightly increased execution time for distrusted modules. We demonstrate that for frequently communicating modules, implementing fault isolation in software rather than hardware can substantially improve end-to-end application performance.

Distributed shared memory (DSM) systems simplify the task of writing distributedmemory parallel programs by automating data distribution and communication. Unfortunately, DSM systems control memory and communication using fixed policies, even when programmers or compilers could manage these resources more efficiently. This thesis proposes a new approach that lets users efficiently manage communication and memory on DSM systems. Systems provide primitive DSM mechanisms without binding them to fixed protocols (policies). Standard shared-memory programs use default protocols similar to those found in current DSM machines. Unlike current systems, these protocols are implemented in unprivileged software. Programmers and compilers are free to modify or replace them with optimized custom protocols that manage memory and communication directly and efficiently. To explore this new approach, this thesis: . identifies a set of mechanisms for distributed shared memory, . develops Tempest, a portab...