[Beowulf] TOE on Linux?

Mark Hahn hahn at mcmaster.ca
Tue May 20 12:10:23 PDT 2008


>>> are other apps that use RDMA to better manage remote data base, one
>>> example is creating shared cache.
>>
>> is this a theoretical feature, or something that people really do?
>>
>> I think the term RDMA leads some people astray because it
>> sounds as if you get something like a sysv shared-memory
>> segment across machines.
>> it's easy to imagine that something like that would be very
>> convenient for the kind of shared data you're talking about.
>
> It is a real product. I can connect you to the vendor if you would like
> to.

sorry, I specifically was wondering about real applications, not vendors.

but do you imply that IB RDMA is being used to provide the kind of network
shared-memory I described?  that is, not put/get, but an area which is 
accessed directly as if it's local memory, but for which machine-level
loads and stores are translated to RDMA transactions?  traditionally,
this kind of thing depends on the host's MMU, which means that certain
important cases (many-writer pages) are pathologically slow.  does IB 
provide some hardware support that ameliorates this problem?

is the vendor you're talking about ScaleMP?



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