Title
Getting Rid of Coherency Overhead for Memory-Hungry Applications
Abstract
Current commercial solutions intended to provide additional resources to an application being executed in a cluster usually aggregate processors and memory from different nodes. In this paper we present a 16-node prototype for a shared-memory cluster architecture that follows a different approach by decoupling the amount of memory available to an application from the processing resources assigned to it. In this way, we provide a new degree of freedom so that the memory granted to a process can be expanded with the memory from other nodes in the cluster without increasing the number of processors used by the program. This feature is especially suitable for memory-hungry applications that demand large amounts of memory but present a parallelization level that prevents them from using more cores than available in a single node. The main advantage of this approach is that an application can use more memory from other nodes without involving the processors, and caches, from those nodes. As a result, using more memory no longer implies increasing the coherence protocol overhead because the number of caches involved in the coherent domain has become independent from the amount of available memory. The prototype we present in this paper leverages this idea by sharing 128GB of memory among the cluster. Real executions show the feasibility of our prototype and its scalability.
Year
DOI
Venue
2010
10.1109/CLUSTER.2010.14
Cluster Computing
Keywords
Field
DocType
aggregate processor,different node,coherency overhead,available memory,large amount,different approach,coherence protocol overhead,16-node prototype,memory-hungry applications,additional resource,memory-hungry application,shared-memory cluster architecture,prototypes,degree of freedom,cluster,protocols,memory management,shared memory
Registered memory,Interleaved memory,Uniform memory access,Computer science,Parallel computing,Distributed memory,Real-time computing,Memory management,Memory map,Flat memory model,Distributed shared memory,Distributed computing
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-0-7695-4220-1
2
0.46
References 
Authors
12
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Hector Montaner131.51
Federico Silla257656.77
Holger Froning331.85
Jose Duato489354.65