Virtual Memory Management in Data Parallel Applications

Abst rac t . The PaLaDiN (PArallel LArge Data set In Network of workstations) project is concerned with parallel out-of-core application running on cluster of workstations or PCs. In such architectures, each node has a virtual memory manager and a first idea is to use this feature to run "parallel out-of-core" application as a parallel in-core one. The out-of-core part of the problem, i.e. the schedule of data fetch and data write-back, is relegated to the operating system. In this paper we show that usual virtual memory manager is not well suited for parallel out-of-core application. Then, we propose an extension to modern operating system which allow to define application specific virtual memory manager. This extension is made up of one kernel module (MMUSSEL) and one library (MMUM) and run on Linux. We present a new pagination strategy for the LU decomposition program.