Department of Informatics Technische Universität München Informatik X: Rechnertechnik und Rechnerorganisation / Parallelrechnerarchitektur Prof. Dr. Arndt Bode , Prof. Dr. Hans Michael Gerndt

Project goals

Despite the long and extensive history of work in the DSM area and the well accepted fact that the shared memory paradigm provides the user with an easy-to-use environment, DSM systems for cluster architectures are still mainly research based. The reasons for this can be seen in two major obstacles: first, the inherent performance problems of software DSM systems prohibiting the users from gaining optimal performance for their applications; second, the abundance of available programming models and the absence of one single clear standardization approach for cluster environments with their special challenges. The HAMSTER project presented here tackles both of these problems for clusters based on the Scalable Coherent Interface (SCI) . This is done by providing a comprehensive infrastructure for the implementation of arbitrary shared memory models built on top of an efficient hybrid hardware/software DSM system, the SCI-Virtual Memory or SCI-VM. The implementation of HAMSTER based shared memory models requires only very little effort. This allows to provide a large number of different programming models on top of a single architecture resulting in an extremely flexible and versatile programming environment.

Like the SMiLE project itself, also the HAMSTER environment is cleanly layered. In the following an overview of the complete architecture:

More information

• The HAMSTER modules
• The HAMSTER interface
• The HAMSTER applications
• The HAMSTER environment
• SCI Virtual Memory: The base hybrid DSM system
• Programming models on top of HAMSTER

Background

• HAMSTER staff
• HAMSTER publications
• Some links to related work

Dr. Thesis / Dissertation covering the complete HAMSTER system

• Shared Memory Programming on NUMA-based Clusters using a General and Open Hybrid Hardware / Software Approach

Links to related topics in SMiLE

• SMiLE message passing
• Other parallel programming paradigms on SMiLE
• SMiLE middleware

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