RAM as a Network Managed Resource
William E. Allcock, Bennett Bernardoni, Colleen Bertoni, Neil Getty, Joseph A. Insley, Michael E. Papka, Silvio Rizzi, Brian R. Toonen · 2018
This paper describes an architecture for and several application examples of using a dynamically allocable RAM pool over the network as part of a deep memory hierarchy. We present four different use cases, including in situ analysis, machine learning, quantum chemistry simulations, and virtualization. In each use case, we modified or implemented software to use a network RAM pool, and then evaluated the performance. The cases of in situ analysis, machine learning, and virtualization demonstrated good performance. While the quantum chemistry experiments exhibited an average slowdown of 53% for all runs, including those where resources were clearly oversubscribed, the scalability results showed promise.