Global address spaces for efficient resource provisioning in the data center

Abstract

The rise of large data sets, or "Big Data'', has coincided with the rise of clusters with large amounts of memory and GPU accelerators that can be used to process rapidly growing data footprints. However, the complexity and performance limitations of sharing memory and accelerators in a cluster limits the options for efficient management and allocation of resources for applications. The global address space model (GAS), and specifically hardware-supported GAS, is proposed as a means to provide a high-performance resource management platform upon which resource sharing between nodes and resource aggregation across nodes can take place. This thesis builds on the initial concept of GAS with a model that is matched to "Big Data'' computing and its data transfer requirements.

The proposed model, Dynamic Partitioned Global Address Spaces (DPGAS), is implemented using a commodity converged interconnect, HyperTransport over Ethernet (HToE), and a software framework, the Oncilla runtime and API. The DPGAS model and associated hardware and software components are used to investigate two application spaces, resource sharing for time-varying workloads and resource aggregation for GPU-accelerated data warehousing applications. This work demonstrates that hardware-supported GAS can be used improve the performance and power consumption of memory-intensive applications, and that it can be used to simplify host and accelerator resource management in the data center.