Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Using JumboMem memory server to share RAM of multiple computers across network

If you need to run a memory-hungry program (eg. high resolution 3D animation renderer) that requires 1TB of memory, how should you run it?

As presented in the paper of Scott Pakin and Greg Johnson in 2007 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing titled Performance Analysis of a User-level Memory Server, JumboMem is an innovative open source Linux application which is the 1st entirely user-level memory server that enables unmodified sequential and also multi-threaded applications (as in version 2.0) to directly access all of the memory in a cluster of computers.

The goal of JumboMem is simple but very powerful, which is to improve the performance of memory-hungry applications by replacing accesses to a slow paging device (a disk) with accesses to fast RAM in other computers located across a high-speed network.

And there are some beauty in this middleware worth mentioning:

  • No administrative access is required. All you need is an ordinary account on any Linux cluster. If you can run an MPI program you can run JumboMem.
  • Your applications don’t need to be modified. Even binaries are okay. You can also run Perl, Python, PHP and other scripting languages.
  • It is very scalable and proven to work with hundreds of nodes combining terrabytes of RAM.

Click here for more explanation, information and download of JumboMem the spectacular memory server.

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