[Beowulf] TOE on Linux?

[Gilad Shainer]

> >>> 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?
>


No it is not ScaleMP. Since this vendor solution (or product) is still
non-public, I can not provide more than just high level. I will more
than happy to update the list when they will be out with it, Basically
you can create a pool of memory that will behave as a shared cache, and
it fall into what you have described. 

Gilad.