Abstract
This paper introduces Strings, a high performance distributed shared memory system designed for clusters of symmetrical multiprocessors (SMPs). The distinguishing feature of this system is the use of a fully multi-threaded runtime system, written using POSIX threads. Strings also allows multiple application threads to be run on each node in a cluster. Since most modern UNIX systems can multiplex these threads on kernel level light weight processes, applications written using Strings can use all the processors in a SMP machine. This paper describes some of the architectural details of the system and analyzes the performance improvements with two example programs and a few benchmark programs from the SPLASH-2 suite.