Roomy: A New Approach to Parallel Disk-based Computation

Disk-based computation provides a major new application of disks in addition to the three traditional uses: file systems, databases, and virtual memory. Our working group has coined the term disk-based computation to describe our five year effort for using parallel disks in scientific computations. Disk-based computation makes use of the many disks already available in a computational cluster. In doing so, we elevate the disk to a level normally reserved for RAM. This provides an application with several orders of magnitude more working space for the same price. These parallel disk-based methods are often based on lower level external memory algorithms, such as those surveyed by Vitter [54]. There are two fundamental challenges in implementing disk-based storage as an extension of main memory: