Distributed memory

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In computer science, distributed memory refers to a multiple-processor computer system in which each processor has its own private memory. This requires computational tasks to be distributed to the different processors for processing. Afterward the data must be reassembled.

Various network topologies are used to connect the multiple processors in distributed memory systems, including ring, mesh, tree, etc.

Similarly, in distributed shared memory each node of a cluster has access to a large shared memory in addition to each node's limited non-shared private memory.

	Topics in Parallel Computing	v • d • e
General High-performance computing Parallelism Data parallelism • Task parallelism Theory Speedup • Amdahl's law • Flynn's Taxonomy • Cost efficiency • Gustafson's Law • Karp-Flatt Metric Elements Process • Thread • Fiber • Parallel Random Access Machine Coordination Multiprocessing • Multitasking • Memory coherency • Cache coherency • Barrier • Synchronization • Distributed computing • Grid computing Programming Programming model • Implicit parallelism • Explicit parallelism Hardware Computer cluster • Beowulf • Symmetric multiprocessing • Non-Uniform Memory Access • Cache only memory architecture • Asymmetric multiprocessing • Simultaneous multithreading • Shared memory • Distributed memory • Massively parallel processing • Superscalar processing • Vector processing • Supercomputer Software Distributed shared memory • Application checkpointing APIs Pthreads • OpenMP • Message Passing Interface (MPI) Problems Embarrassingly parallel • Grand Challenge