On The Use of Network DRAM in LAPACK Programs

Network DRAM is the idea of using RAM on another workstation instead of local disk as a backing store for virtual memory. Network RAM generally has a lower access time than disk but has inferior fault tolerance. In this paper, we examine the benefit of network RAM when running some of the most popular LAPACK programs. We found that network RAM does not help these LAPACK programs as much as one might expect because of the nature of the algorithms used and the types of problems solved using these programs.