SGER: Dynamic Partitioned Global Address Spaces for Future Large Scale Systems

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With the continued explosive growth in electronic information, bothbusiness enterprises and high performance computing systems are beingstructured as large ensembles of interconnected modularcomputing/storage modules or blades. These systems form the nextgeneration data centers and supercomputers and a major impediment totheir successful wide-spread deployment is the growing capital cost aswell as power and cooling costs. A dominant contributor to these costsis the memory subsystem that can exceed the costs of the processingcore and consume as much as 25%-40% of the energy in high endconfigurations. Currently, the architecture of data centers limits howphysical memory in data centers can be shared by different programs inthe system. Consequently, systems must be designed to accommodate theworst case peak memory demand and is therefore unduly expensive bothin terms of capital cost as well as power. The proposed research explores a novel solution for the reduction of memory system related costs by enabling memory to be shared across blades in a dynamic, demand-driven, fashion. The key idea is the tight integration of memory subsystem with the network subsystem. The result is a significant increase is memory efficiency and an attendant drop in the total memory requirements of a data center with little to no performance penalty. This approach is made feasible by exploiting recent advances in chip integration where the memory controllers and high performance communication interfaces are integrated on the same die. Thus cost and power can be more effectively managed than previously feasible by tracking actual memory demand rather than statically provisioning for worst case memory demand.To maintain its leadership in computing, U.S. industry requires bothtechnical advances such as those proposed here, new companies thatleverage these advances, and new employees with the skill sets neededfor rapid technology and product development. The proposed work offerssuitable technical elements to offer ways to engage students inComputer Science and Engineering topics, to arrest the ongoing declinein the U.S. enrollment in CS and CmpE, to create new employmentopportunities and to leverage the creativity and entrepreneurialnature of the U.S. student population. Existing relationships withtechnology companies such as IBM, HP, and Intel through an existingNSF I/UCRCat Georgia Tech will provide pathways to influence the systemcommunity.