Design and Implementation of an SCI-Based Network Cache Coherent NUMA System for High-Performance PC Clustering
Soo-Cheol Oh, Sang–Hwa Chung · Jeongbo gwahaghoe nonmunji. si'seu'tem mich i'lon · 2004
It is extremely important to minimize network access time in constructing a high-performance PC cluster system. For PC cluster systems, it is possible to reduce network access time by maintaining network cache in each cluster node. This paper presents a Network Cache Coherent NUMA (NCC-NUMA) system to utilize network cache by locating shared memory on the PCI bus, and the NCC-NUMA card which is core module of the NCC-NUMA system is developed. The NCC-NUMA card is directly plugged into the PCI slot of each node, and contains shared memory, network cache, shared memory control module and network control module. The network cache is maintained for the shared memory on the PCI bus of cluster nodes. The coherency mechanism between the network cache and the shared memory is based on the IEEE SCI standard. According to the SPLASH-2 benchmark experiments, the NCC-NUMA system showed improvements of 56% compared with an SCI-based cluster without network cache.