Title
Unleash Your Memory-Constrained Applications: A 32-Node Non-coherent Distributed-Memory Prototype Cluster
Abstract
Improvements in hardware for parallel shared-memory computing usually involve increments in the number of computing cores and in the amount of memory available for a given application. However, many shared-memory applications do not require more computing cores than available in current motherboards because their scalability is bounded to a few tens of parallel threads. Nevertheless, they may still benefit from having more memory resources. Additionally, the performance of extended systems involving more cores is typically constrained by the glueing coherency protocol, whose overhead lowers the performance of the final system. In this paper we present a 32-node prototype of a new non-coherent distributed-memory architecture for clusters, aimed to provide applications additional memory borrowed from other nodes without providing them more cores, thus avoiding the penalty of maintaining coherency among nodes of the cluster. Results from the execution of real applications in this prototype demonstrate that our proposal truly works, as well as its performance is assessed.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1109/HPCC.2011.12
HPCC
Keywords
DocType
Citations 
glueing coherency protocol,extended system,32-node non-coherent distributed-memory prototype,shared-memory application,parallel thread,computing core,current motherboards,applications additional memory,memory-constrained applications,32-node prototype,memory resource,parallel shared-memory computing,shared memory,cluster,distributed memory,hypertransport
Conference
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
7
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Hector Montaner131.51
Federico Silla257656.77
Holger Froning331.85
Jose Duato489354.65