NUMA

[gboyce at badbelly.com (Gregory Boyce)]

On Thu, 10 Mar 2005 markw at mohawksoft.com wrote:

> Non-Uniform Memory Architecture is a way of clustering multiple CPUs,
> closer than something like a beowulf, but not quite SMP either.
>
> Has anyone seen or heard of NUMA being simulated or implemented using high
> speed ethernet?

I believe that NUMA systems are generally large scale SMP boxes rather 
than multiple distinct computers.  NUMA setups have an idea of memory 
being local to a particular processor rather than just being general 
system memory.

This allows you to have removable modules for the computer with a CPU and 
memory included on it in order to dynamically scale your system.  The 
modules plug into a high speed backplane, in some cases allowing for hot 
swapping of components.

I believe the systems themselves need to be wired for NUMA, and the system 
bios needs to support it in some fashion.  Even if ethernet was fast 
enough, I don't believe the systems would be able to run the single OS 
across the multiple systems required.

Maybe there's some way of running a NUMA emulator over MOSIX cluster or 
something.

I did find at least a bit of useful information here:
http://lse.sourceforge.net/numa/faq/