Zusammenfassung
We make the case for virtual shared memory (VSM) for supporting future many-core chips. VSM is a shared memory abstraction implemented over distributed memory by a hypervisor, providing the operating system direct access to all memory in the system. VSM on a distributed-memory system, such as a many-core chip with local memory associated with each core or small group of cores, provides a non-uniform memory model to the operating system. We argue, based on our experience with a prototype called vNUMA (implemented on a cluster), that this model can perform well for NUMA-aware software. The indirection layer provided by the virtualization provides benefits to hardware manufacturers, as it can absorb certain faults, including faulty nodes and packet losses in the interconnect.
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