Evangelos P. Markatos - George Dramitinos - Kosmas Papachristos 

Technical Report FORTH/ICS 129

Institute of Computer Science (ICS)
Foundation for Research & Technology -- Hellas (FORTH) 
P.O.Box 1385 
Heraklio, Crete, GR-711-10 GREECE 
markatos@csi.forth.gr

March 1995

Abstract:

Traditional operating systems use magnetic disks as paging devices, even though the cost of each page-fault measured in processor cycles continues to increase.

In this paper we explore the use or remote main memory for paging. We describe the design, implementation and evaluation of a pager that uses main memory of remote workstations as a faster-than-disk paging device. Our pager has been implemented as a block device driver linked to the DEC/OSF1 operating system, without any modifications to the kernel code. Using several test applications we measure the performance of remote memory paging over an Ethernet interconnection network and find it to be faster than traditional disk paging.

We conclude that the increasing use of fast local area networks will improve the performance of remote memory paging even more.

• Introduction
• Related Work
• The Design of a Remote Memory Pager
  • Selection of Workstations
  • Reliability
    • Mirroring
    • Parity
    • Parity Caching
• Implementation
  • The Remote Memory Pager
  • The Remote Memory Server
• Performance Results
  • Performance of Remote Memory Paging Over the Ethernet
  • Scaling the Input
  • Scaling the Network Bandwidth
  • The Latency of Remote Memory Paging
  • Using Busy Workstations as Servers
  • Reliability
    • Parity Caching
• Discussion - Future work
  • Choosing servers
  • Network load
  • Thrashing
  • Compression
  • Reliability
• Conclusions
• Acknowledgments
• References
• About this document ...

Evangelos Markatos 
Fri Mar 24 14:41:51 EET 1995