Memory Management Issues in Large Scale Shared Memory MIMD Multiprocessors

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Nonuniformity of memory access is an almost inevitable feature of the memory architecture in shared memory designs that can scale to large numbers of processors, creating the increasingly important class of NUMA (nonuniform memory access time) multiprocessors. Managing the placement and movement of code and data is crucial to performance in NUMA architectures. This has been called the NUMA Problem. The I/O bottleneck problem is also exacerbated by parallel architectures which widen the gap between processing speed and disk speed even beyond that created by improved processor technology. This project investigates operating system mechanisms and policies for the management of the various levels of shared storage in such large- scale shared memory multiprocessors. The specific projects divide into the following classes: main memory management (both traditional virtual memory and the migration and replication of pages among various main memory modules), parallel file system design, workload characterization and performance evaluation methodology and the role of the programming environment in solving the NUMA Problem.