DLM: A distributed Large Memory System using remote memory swapping over cluster nodes

• Published in: 2008 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing pp. 268 - 273
• Main Authors: Midorikawa, H., Kurokawa, M., Himeno, R., Sato, M.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01-09-2008
• Subjects: Arrays; Bandwidth; Benchmark testing; Kernel; Memory management; Performance evaluation; Servers
• ISBN: 1424426391; 9781424426393
• ISSN: 1552-5244; 2168-9253
• DOI: 10.1109/CLUSTR.2008.4663780

Emerging 64 bitOSpsilas supply a huge amount of memory address space that is essential for new applications using very large data. It is expected that the memory in connected nodes can be used to store swapped pages efficiently, especially in a dedicated cluster which has a high-speed network such as 10 GbE and Infiniband. In this paper, we propose the distributed large memory system (DLM), which provides very large virtual memory by using remote memory distributed over the nodes in a cluster. The performance of DLM programs using remote memory is compared to ordinary programs using local memory. The results of STREAM, NPB and Himeno benchmarks show that the DLM achieves better performance than other remote paging schemes using a block swap device to access remote memory. In addition to performance, DLM offers the advantages of easy availability and high portability, because it is a user-level software without the need for special hardware. To obtain high performance, the DLM can tune its parameters independently from kernel swap parameters. We also found that DLMpsilas independence of kernel swapping provides more stable behavior.