Who
Dr. Chloe Alverti
When
17 Dec 2025, 13:00 Athens time, Science Building 141Π98 Amphitheater Thelma Mavridou
Title
The Renaissance of Distributed Shared Memory Systems
Abstract
Distributed Shared Memory (DSM), a long-standing systems vision, is being revisited as emerging interconnects such as CXL offer low-latency, cache-coherent memory access across the nodes of a rack. This technological shift invites us to rethink core systems interfaces: how processes and state move across machines, how shared-memory applications scale in distributed settings, and how DSM systems remain resilient in the presence of faults. Progress will require advances in both software and hardware—and often their co-design. This talk highlights two recent developments along this path. CXLfork, a system-software mechanism, introduces a zero-serialization, near-zero-copy remote fork by checkpointing process state directly into shared CXL memory. It enables cluster-wide state deduplication, fine-grained state tiering, and near-local fork latency, unlocking rapid process scaling across the rack – essential for highly concurrent workloads such as serverless functions. At the hardware layer, PhasedStore addresses a fundamental vulnerability of cache-coherent DSM systems: resilience to node failures. In such systems, node crashes can silently lose dirty shared data buffered in private CPU caches. PhasedStore mitigates this risk by supporting high-performance write-through coherence protocols that ensure dirty data is propagated into a fault-tolerant domain, all while preserving the widely adopted Total Store Order (TSO) memory consistency model. Together, these developments outline a path toward practical, performant, and fault-tolerant distributed shared memory.
About the Speaker
Chloe Alverti received her Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens in 2014 and her Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the same institution in 2022. From 2023 to 2025 she was a post-doctoral researcher at the CS department of the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). Prior and during her PhD studies, she has held research positions at Chalmers University of Technology, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and she also spent a year at ZeroPoint Technologies, an academic spin-off. Her research interests span operating systems, computer architecture and hardware–software co-design. Her core expertise lies in translating hardware technological shifts into system software innovations and for over a decade her work has centered on memory systems. She is a recipient of multiple HiPEAC and best paper awards, and her recent work on process “teleportation”’ over CXL fabrics received the Best Paper Award at ASPLOS 2025.
