Definition of shared memory in English English dictionary
A memory that is directly accessed by more than one node of a concurrent processor Shared memory and distributed memory are two major architectures that require very different programming styles
Memory that appears to live in a single address space which more than one processor can access; cf distributed memory
Memory that is shared my more than one CSU or ALU Typically, this is built into a single machine
Memory that appears to the user to be contained in a single address space and that can be accessed by any process In a uniprocessor or multiprocessor there is typically a single memory unit, or several memory units interleaved to give the appearance of a single memory unit See also disjoint memory; distributed memory [Wil93]
A portion of main memory that processes can use to communicate and share common data, thus reducing disk I/O and improving performance
A model of parallel computing Processes use the same memory but have different program counters This is used primarily on symmetric multiprocessor computers See Also: Message Passing
Memory that appears to the user to be contained in a single address space that can be accessed by any process or any node (functional unit) of the computer Shared memory may have UMA or NUMA structure Distributed computers can have a shared memory model implemented in either hardware or software---this would always be NUMA Shared memory parallel computers can be either NUMA or UMA Virtual or Distributed Shared Memory is (the illusion of) a shared memory built with physically distributed memory
Hardware architecture in which multiple processors operate independently but share the same memory resources See distributed memory
A term applied to both hardware and software indicating the presence of a memory region that is shared between system components For programming environments, the term means that memory is shared between processes or threads Applied to hardware, it means that the architectural feature tying processors together is shared memory See shared address space and explicit shared memory