CableS: Thread Control and Memory Management Extensions for Shared Virtual Memory Clusters

Clusters of high-end workstations and PCs are currently used in many application domains to perform large-scale computations or as scalable servers for I/O bound tasks. Although clusters have many advantages, their applicability in emerging areas of applications has been limited. One of the main reasons for this is the fact that clusters do not provide a single system image and thus are hard to program. In this work we address this problem by providing a single cluster image with respect to thread and memory management. We implement our system, CableS (Cluster enabled threadS), on a 32-processor cluster interconnected with a low-latency, high-bandwidth system area network and conduct an early exploration of the costs involved in providing the extra functionality. We demonstrate the versatility of CableS with a wide range of applications and show that clusters can be used to support applications that have been written for more expensive tightly?coupled systems, with very little effort ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2002
• Where: HPCA
• Authors: Peter Jamieson, Angelos Bilas
• Keywords: Computer Architecture, HPCA 2002, Legacy Pthreads Applications, Memory Mappings Granularity, Pthreads Source Code