NICTA
UNSW
We make the case for virtual shared memory (VSM) for supporting future many-core chips. VSM is a shared memory abstraction implemented over distributed memory by a hypervisor, providing the operating system direct access to all memory in the system. VSM on a distributed-memory system, such as a many-core chip with local memory associated with each core or small group of cores, provides a non-uniform memory model to the operating system. We argue, based on our experience with a prototype called vNUMA (implemented on a cluster), that this model can perform well for NUMA-aware software. The indirection layer provided by the virtualization provides benefits to hardware manufacturers, as it can absorb certain faults, including faulty nodes and packet losses in the interconnect.
@inproceedings{Heiser_09_3, address = {Washington, DC, USA}, author = {Heiser, Gernot}, booktitle = {Workshop on Managed Many-Core Systems}, keywords = {operating systems, virtual machines, hypervisors, multicore}, month = mar, pages = {4 pages}, paperurl = {https://trustworthy.systems/publications/nicta_full_text/1780.pdf}, title = {Many-Core Chips — A Case for Virtual Shared Memory}, year = {2009} }