Commodity Converged Fabrics for Global Address Spaces in Accelerator Clouds
Hardware support for Global Address Spaces (GAS) has previously focused on providing efficient access across remote memories, typically using custom interconnects or high-level software layers. New technologies, such as Extoll, HyperShare, and NumaConnect now allow for cheaper ways to build GAS support into the data center, thus making high-performance coherent and non-coherent remote memory access available for standard data center applications. At the same time, data center designers are currently experimenting with a greater use of accelerators like GPUs to enhance traditionally CPU-oriented processes, such as data warehousing queries for in-core databases. However, there are very few workable approaches for these accelerator clusters that both use commodity interconnects and also support simple multi-node programming models, such as GAS.