Proposal and Evaluation of Realization Approach for a Shared Memory System in λ Computing Environment

摘要

In this paper, we propose a new computing environment (which we will refer to A computing environment) that provides a base for parallel computing among nodes distributed in the wide area. In our concept, virtual channels are provided utilizing optical networks connecting computing nodes. It can offer high-speed and reliable connection pipe among nodes, so that it is efficiently applicable to SAN (Storage Area Network) and/or Grid computing. In the environment, shared memory is constituted on a virtual ring of the photonic network. Consequently, it is not necessary to distinguish shared memory in a wide-area distributed system from a communication channel; thus high-speed data exchange between computing nodes on the ring can be achieved. The key to realizing such a computing environment is how to construct a shared memory system on the photonic ring. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a shared memory system suitable to the virtual optical ring network, which takes into account contention resolution, cache coherency, and synchronization methods because the propagation delays among nodes are much larger than the conventional shared memory system. Through simulation experiments of using three benchmark programs as representative parallel computing applications, we show the applicability of our shared memory system on the wide-area virtual photonic ring.