vNUMA: A virtual shared-memory multiprocessor
Authors
Matthew Chapman and Gernot Heiser
School of Computer Science and Engineering
University of New South Wales
Sydney 2052 Australia
NICTA, Sydney,
Australia
Open Kernel Labs, Sydney, Australia
Abstract
vNUMA, for virtual NUMA, is a virtual machine that presents a cluster as a virtual shared-memory multiprocessor. It is designed to make the computational power of clusters available to legacy applications and operating systems.
We present the design and Itanium-based implementation of vNUMA, and its trade-offs. We discuss in detail the enhancements to standard protocols that were made when implementing distributed shared memory inside a hypervisor instead of middleware. We examine the scalability of vNUMA on a small cluster, and analyse some of the design choices.
BibTeX Entry
@inproceedings{Chapman_Heiser_09,
title = {{vNUMA}: A Virtual Shared-Memory Multiprocessor},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2009 USENIX Annual Technical Conference},
author = {Matthew Chapman and Gernot Heiser},
year = {2009},
month = {Jun},
address = {San Diego, CA, USA},
pages = {349--362}
}