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An SCI-Based PC Cluster Utilizing Coherent Network Cache

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Abstract

It is extremely important to minimize network access time in constructing a high-performance PC cluster system. For an SCI-based PC cluster, it is possible to reduce the network access time by maintaining network cache in each cluster node. This paper presents a Network-Cache-Coherent-NUMA (NCC-NUMA) card that utilizes network cache for SCI-based PC clustering. The NCC-NUMA card is directly plugged into the PCI slot of each node, and contains shared memory, network cache, and interconnection modules. The network cache is maintained for the shared memory on the PCI bus of cluster nodes. The coherency mechanism between the network cache and the shared memory is based on the IEEE SCI standard. Both a simulator and an NCC-NUMA prototype card are developed to evaluate the performance of the system. According to the experiments, the cluster system with the NCC-NUMA card showed considerable improvements compared with an SCI-based cluster without network cache.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Pusan National University, Pusan, 609-735, Korea

    Sang-Hwa Chung & Soo-Cheol Oh

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  1. Sang-Hwa Chung
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  2. Soo-Cheol Oh
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Correspondence to Sang-Hwa Chung.

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Chung, SH., Oh, SC. An SCI-Based PC Cluster Utilizing Coherent Network Cache. Cluster Computing 6, 153–159 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022856606542

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022856606542

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