carla@macbeth.cs.duke.edu (Carla Ellis) (10/18/89)
NUMAtic Project CONTACTS: Carla Ellis carla@cs.duke.edu (919) 660-6523 Mark Holliday holliday@cs.duke.edu (919) 660-6525 Department of Computer Science Duke University Durham NC 27243 USA DESCRIPTION: Non-uniformity of memory access is an almost inevitable feature of the memory architecture in any shared memory multiprocessor design that can scale to large numbers of processors. The NUMAtic project is a program of experimental research exploring memory management on NUMA machines. Experience has shown that attention to placement and movement of data and code is crucial to performance in NUMA environments. However, the need to explicitly manage the location of data is a significant burden on the programmer. The additional complexity of this memory architecture demands that the operating system assume an even larger role in providing memory management support. The scope of the project covers a full range of policies and mechanisms for controlling the location and movement of data including 1) the migration of code and data among the distinct memory modules that collectively comprise the main memory of a NUMA machine, 2) the replication (or caching) of copies of pages within main memory, 3) the page fetch, placement, and pageout algorithms associated with virtual memory, and 4) the organization and management of secondary memory based on parallel independent disks. The emphasis is on evaluating the impact of design alternatives and identifying the factors affecting behavior of systems employing these techniques. The environment for the project is the BBN Butterfly GP-1000 multiprocessor. REFERENCES: @inproceedings{ellis:prefetch, AUTHOR = "C. Ellis and D. Kotz", TITLE = "Prefetching in File Systems for {MIMD} Multiprocessors", BOOKTITLE = icpp89, YEAR = "1989", MONTH = "August", NOTE = "" } @inproceedings{holliday:pagetable, AUTHOR = "M. Holliday", TITLE = "Page Table Management in Local/Remote Architectures", BOOKTITLE = "ACM SIGARCH Int. Conf. on Supercomputing", YEAR = "1988", PAGES = "1-8", MONTH = "July", NOTE = "" } @inproceedings{holliday:asplos, AUTHOR = "M. Holliday", TITLE = "Reference History, Page Size, and Migration Daemons in Local/remote Architectures", BOOKTITLE = ASPLOS , YEAR = "1989", PAGES = "", MONTH = "April", NOTE = "" } @techreport{holliday:placement, AUTHOR = "M. Holliday", TITLE = "On the Effectiveness of Dynamic Page Placement", INSTITUTION = "Duke University", YEAR = "1989", NUMBER = "TR-1989-19", MONTH = "September", NOTE = "" } @ARTICLE{kotz:prefetch, AUTHOR = "D. Kotz and C. Ellis", TITLE = "Prefetching in File Systems for {MIMD} Multiprocessors", JOURNAL = "IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems", YEAR = "1990", VOLUME = "1", NUMBER = "1", MONTH = jan, NOTE = "to appear" } @techreport{kotz:coop, AUTHOR = "D. Kotz and C. Ellis", TITLE = "Inter-process Cooperation in Prefetching for Parallel File Systems ", INSTITUTION = "Duke University", YEAR = "1989", MONTH = "October", NOTE = "" } @techreport{larowe:placement, AUTHOR = "R. LaRowe and C. Ellis", TITLE = "Virtual Page Placement Policies for {NUMA} Multiprocessors", YEAR = "1989", MONTH = "April", INSTITUTION = "Duke University", NUMBER = "CS-1989-2", NOTE = "" } @techreport{larowe:recall, AUTHOR = "R. LaRowe and C. Ellis", TITLE = "Dynamic Page Placement in a {NUMA} Multiprocessor Virtual Memory System", INSTITUTION = "Duke University", YEAR = "1989", MONTH = "October", NUMBER = "TR CS-1989-21", NOTE = "" }