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.
A memory location that can be read from and written to by separate processes. Data stored in shared memory can be "shared" between programs.
(n.) 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.
Shared memory is a method of interprocess communication. When using shared memory, the operating system kernel allocates an area of memory, a shared memory segment, which any number of processes may access. Any information written into this area is immediately accessible by all processes "attached" to that shared memory segment (allowing certain permissions). Although shared memory is fast, the application must control all access to shared memory
Multiple CPUs sharing the same main memory
Memory accessed by more than one process or thread in a multitasking environment. Processes or threads using this memory operate under a set of rules that prevent them from modifying the same addresses simultaneously.
Memory that is addressable by two different tasks or processes. Shared memory is typically used to exchange data between two or more cooperating tasks.
A memory architecture in memory can be accessed by all processors in the system. This architecture can also support virtual memory. This type of memory is sometimes referred to as shared virtual memory or global virtual memory.
A portion of main memory that processes can use to communicate and share common data, thus reducing disk I/O and improving performance.
Memory that appears to live in a single address space which more than one processor can access; cf. distributed memory.
Memory in a parallel computer, usually RAM (Random Access Memory - the "working memory" of the computer) which can be accessed by more than one processor, usually via a shared bus or network. Software Instructions or sets of instructions, also called a program, that directs a computer's handling of data.
A memory segment that can be accessed simultaneously by more than one process.
When a video card does not have its own Video RAM (VRAM) and shares the system's RAM to render images. Shared memory is usually slower and takes up memory that other applications might use.
The following features in this phone may share memory: Phone book Text and multimedia messages Images and ringing tones in the Gallery Calendar To-do notes Java(tm) games and applications Using any such features may reduce the memory available for any features sharing memory. This is especially true with heavy use of any of the features (although some of the features may have a certain amount of memory specially allotted to them in addition to the amount of memory shared with other features). For example, saving many: images bookmarks Java applications, etc. may take all of the shared memory and your phone may display a message that the memory is full. In this case, delete some of the information or entries stored in the shared memory features before continuing.
Shared memory means that the number of total entries depends on the amount of content/information for each entry. In other words, the more content you have per entry, the fewer entries you can have (e.g. several numbers under one name in the phone book means fewer phone book entries in total).
Portion of memory accessible to multiple processes.
Real or virtual memory that appears to users to constitute a single address space, but which is actually physically disjoint. Virtual shared memory is often implemented using some combination of hashing and local caching. 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.
Memory configuration of a computer in which all processors have direct access to all the memory in the system. Because of technological limitations on shared bandwidth generally not more than about 16 processors share a common memory.
System memory that is simultaneously available to two or more processes.
Hardware architecture in which multiple processors operate independently but share the same memory resources. See distributed memory.
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.