NUMA

[markw at mohawksoft.com]

Jon Masters Wrote:
>
> Best stick with one of the suggestions already made. NUMA is designed
> for real physical hardware, what you want is a cheap cluster.
>

Actually, I have a cheap cluster. I have five dual CPU SMP boxes networked
on a high speed switch. I've done several projects that use this setup as
either a load balanced server or a beowulf cluster.

While I haven't used Mosix (I use these machines for tests and
development, I hesitate to use a heavily modified kernel), I do think it
is neat. The reason why I'm curious about NUMA simulation is the idea that
it could be possible to run programs written similarly to how you'd write
MPI programs, but with "implicit" sharing of memory instead of "explicit"
sharing in the form of messages.

ccNUMA should be able to be implemented on the x86 architecture using
virtual memory mapping and the shm library. It would probably take a
kernel module or two, but it would be cool.