Network RAM for Beowulf

[Thomas R Boehme]

There are many applications that could make reasonable use of network RAM.
Basically everything which need more RAM then currently possible and
therefore has to swap to disk to process the data (database applications,
gaussian, etc.). The network latency is high compared to memory latency, but
not compared to disk slatency. There, network beats it by several orders of
magnitude.
I know a lot of applications which have swapfiles of several gigabytes,
beeing able to keep them in memory (and even if it is network ram) can speed
then up significantly. And not everybody can afford to buy Itaniums with
more than 4 Gig's of memory.

Bye, Thommy

-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Hahn [mailto:hahn at physics.mcmaster.ca] 
Sent: Thursday, August 16, 2001 9:52 AM
To: beowulf at beowulf.org
Subject: Re: Network RAM for Beowulf


> >    we as a group of four students are *also* thinking
> > of implementing Network RAM for a beowulf cluster
> > (assuming 100Mbps Ethernet ) whereby each node in the

I'm always puzzled why people want to keep trying this:
have you considered the fairly breathtaking latency of 
"sharing" pages over a net?  do you really have apps that can 
tolerate that kind of latency?



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