Dynamic partitioned global address spaces for high-efficiency computing
Jeffrey Young · SMARTech Repository (Georgia Institute of Technology) · 2008
The current trend of ever larger clusters and data centers has coincided with a dramatic increase in the cost and power of these installations. While many efficiency improvements have focused on processor power and cooling costs, reducing the cost and power consumption of high-performance memory has mostly been overlooked. This thesis proposes a new address translation model called Dynamic Partitioned Global Address Space (DPGAS) that extends the ideas of NUMA and software-based approaches to create a high-performance hardware model that can be used to reduce the overall cost and power of memory in larger server installations. A memory model and hardware implementation of DPGAS is developed, and simulations of memory-intensive workloads are used to show potential cost and power reductions when DPGAS is integrated into a server environment.