Dodo: A User-level System for Exploiting Idle Memory in Workstation Clusters

In this paper, we present the design and implementation of Dodo, an e cient user-level system for harvesting idle memory in o -the-shelf clusters of workstations. Dodo enables data-intensive applications to use remote memory in a cluster as an intermediate cache between local memory and disk. It requires no modi cations to the operating system and or processor rmware and is hence portable to multiple platforms. Further, the memory recruitment policy used by Dodo is designed to minimize any delays experienced by the owner of desktop machines whose memory is harvested by Dodo. Our implementation of Dodo is operational and currently runs on Linux 2.0.35. For communication, Dodo can use either UDP IP or U-Net, the low-latency user-level network architecture developed by von Eicken et al 4 . We evaluated the performance improvements that can be achieved by using Dodo for two real applications and three synthetic benchmarks. Our results show that speedups obtained for an application are hig...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1999
• Where: HPDC
• Authors: Samir Koussih, Anurag Acharya, Sanjeev Setia
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, Dodo, HPDC 1999, Local Memory, Remote Memory