Abstract
We show how novel active memory system research and system networking trends can be combined to realize hardware distributed shared memory on clusters of industry-standard workstations. Our active memory controller extends the cache coherence protocol to support transparent use of address re-mapping techniques that dramatically improve single-node performance, and also contains the necessary functionality for building a hardware DSM machine. Simultaneously, commodity network technology is becoming more tightly-integrated with the memory controller. We call our design of active memory commodity nodes interconnected by a next-generation network active memory clusters. We present a detailed design of the AMC architecture, focusing on the active memory controller and the network characteristics necessary to support AMC. We show simulation results for a range of parallel applications, showing that AMC performance is comparable to that of custom hardware DSM systems and far exceeds that of the fastest software DSM solutions.
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Heinrich, M., Speight, E., Chaudhuri, M. (2002). Active Memory Clusters: Efficient Multiprocessing on Commodity Clusters. In: Zima, H.P., Joe, K., Sato, M., Seo, Y., Shimasaki, M. (eds) High Performance Computing. ISHPC 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2327. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-47847-7_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-47847-7_9
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