Swap File Organizations in Parallel Virtual Memory Systems

This paper addresses the problem of providing a parallel virtual memory system with an efficient swap file structure. It has been observed, experimentally, that the way data is organized in a parallel I/O environment greatly influences the I/O performance. Therefore, if virtual memory is to be implemented in parallel machines, its disk swap space organization will be one of the key factors determining the virtual memory system’s efficiency. We analyze different parallel file organizations in order to determine which one better suits the needs of a parallel virtual memory system. Simulation results collected thus far indicate that the best strategy is to assign to each I/O node data that will be utilized mostly by neighbor processors. We observed that this approach better load balances I/O requests among I/O nodes and better explores inter-processor locality.