Legacy and emerging applications with large working sets and, when executed on commodity servers, may exhibit poor performance due to frequent page faults which rely on the slow disk swap partition. This research aims to establish immense memory collectively across nodes of a networked computing system for holding pages evicted from the main memory of any participating nodes during application runs with large working sets, realizing cooperative memory expansion (COMEX). It has a great promise to advance technical understanding and scientific frontiers of networked computing systems.
Given its wide adoption by operating systems and networking gear vendors nowadays, the remote direct memory access (RDMA) technology is adopted by COMEX for ultra-low latencies in page transfer between nodes whose OS kernel and CPU can be totally bypassed. This project deals with five technical challenges and the solution approaches to those challenges together will constitute the basis of the COMEX Handler, able to enhance execution performance and system throughput via better utilizing overall system DRAM memory on-demand. The project will also improve the research and educational activities on computer systems and distributed computing on the University of Louisiana at Lafayette campus, with its outcomes helping to integrate research and education for enriched teaching, training, and learning experience and to educate quality future workforce critical to the NSF mission, the state of Louisiana and the nation.
