Active Memory Clusters: Efficient Multiprocessing on Commodity Clusters

We show how novel active memory system research and system networking trends can be combined to realize hardware distributed shared memory on clusters of industry-standard workstations. Our active memory controller extends the cache coherence protocol to support transparent use of address re-mapping techniques that dramatically improve single-node performance, and also contains the necessary functionality for building a hardware DSM machine. Simultaneously, commodity network technology is becoming more tightly-integrated with the memory controller. We call our design of active memory commodity nodes interconnected by a next-generation network active memory clusters. We present a detailed design of the AMC architecture, focusing on the active memory controller and the network characteristics necessary to support AMC. We show simulation results for a range of parallel applications, showing that AMC performance is comparable to that of custom hardware DSM systems and far exceeds that of the fastest software DSM solutions.