This feature, combined with a low latency and a high bandwidth, has motivated people to implement message passing interfaces for SCI networks. This technology is also well suited to implement software-based Distributed Shared Memories, as it allows efficient remote read and write operations.
Reliability is ensured by the hardware but consistency is the user's responsibility.
SciOS and SciFS are both implemented as kernel modules. Shared memoy segments are presented to the user as filesand are accessed by using file operations such as the open, mmap, and close system calls. SciOS offers basic services for SCI clusters, such as active messages, remote procedure calls, synchronization primitives, memory allocation, de-allocation and invalidation. In SciFS, an application can request different memory management protocols depending on the sharing pattern for a given file. The model is based on Lazy Release Consistency, which assumes that shared memory accesses are synchronized at the application level.