Description.

DRAM is a precious resource in extreme-scale machines and is increasingly becoming scarce, mainly due to the growing number of cores per node. On future multi-petaflop and exaflop machines, the memory pressure is likely to be so severe that we need to rethink our memory usage models. Fortunately, the advent of non-volatile memory (NVM) offers a unique opportunity in this space. Current NVM offerings possess several desirable properties, such as low cost and power efficiency, but also suffer from high latency and lifetime issues. We need rich techniques to be able to use them alongside DRAM. NVMalloc is an approach for exploiting NVM as a secondary memory partition so that applications can explicitly allocate and manipulate memory regions therein. More specifically, it is a middleware library with a suite of services that enables applications to access node-local or distributed NVM storage system in a seamless fashion.

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People.

• Sudharshan Vazhkudai (UT/ORNL)
• Youngjae Kim (ORNL)
• Xiaosong Ma (NCSU/ORNL)
• Chao Wang (Postdoc at UT-ORNL)
• Fei Meng (graduate student at NCSU)

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Research Publications.

1. C. Wang, S.S. Vazhkudai, X. Ma, F. Meng, Y. Kim, C. Engelmann, "NVMalloc: Exposing an Aggregate SSD Store as a Memory Partition in Extreme-Scale Machines", Proceedings of the 26th IEEE Int’l Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS 2012), Shanghai, China, May 2012. pdf

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Job Opportunities.

• NEW!: ORNL: Internships available all through the year

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