The distributed virtual shared-memory system based on the InfiniBand architecture

Even though there have been strong research activities about distributed virtual shared-memory (DVSM) systems, their architectures have been not widely used in current high-performance computing markets. The reason is that the previously introduced DVSM systems use conventional interconnection technologies like Ethernet, which incurs high execution overhead due to process interruption at data communication for memory consistency. In this paper, we present the DVSM architecture based on the next generation of an interconnection technique, the InfiniBand Architecture (IBA). Because the IBA supports shared-memory programming semantics by means of remote direct-memory access (RDMA) and atomic operations in hardware, we can minimize the communication overhead for memory consistency on the DVSM system. For characterizing multithreaded applications on our IBA-based DVSM system, we examined two different shared-memory programming models, i.e. SPMD and OpenMP benchmarks. We show that our DVSM to use full features of the IBA can improve the performance significantly over the IPoIB-based DVSM system in all benchmarks, and also comparable to the bus-based shared-memory multiprocessor system in some benchmarks.