Large scientific parallel applications demand large amounts of memory space. Current parallel computing platforms schedule jobs without fully knowing their memory requirements. This leads to uneven memory allocation in which some nodes are overloaded. This, in turn, leads to disk paging, which is extremely expensive in the context of scientific parallel computing. To solve this problem, we propose a new peer-to-peer solution called Parallel Network RAM. This approach avoids the use of disk and better utilizes available RAM resources. This approach will allow larger problems to be solved while reducing the computational, communication and synchronization overhead typically involved in parallel applications. 1.

Memory-intensive applications often suffer from the poor performance of disk swapping when memory is inadequate. Remote memory sharing schemes, which provide a remote memory that is faster than the local hard disk, are able to improve the performance of such applications. Due to the limitation of being applicable within single clusters only, however, most of the previous remote memory mechanisms, such as the network memory scheme, fail to be extendable into a large scale, distributed, heterogeneous, and dynamic environment. In this work, we propose a service-oriented grid memory sharing scheme, Distributed Paging RAM Grid (DPRG). We study the properties and criteria of large scale memory sharing, and then design major operations and optimizations to fit the usage of grid systems. We collect trace from our grid environment, and evaluate DPRG through comprehensive trace-driven simulations. Results show that DPRG significantly outperforms existing remote memory sharing schemes and supports grid computing applications effectively. 1.

Large scientific parallel applications demand large amounts of memory space. Current parallel computing platforms schedule jobs without fully knowing their memory requirements. This leads to uneven memory allocation in which some nodes are overloaded. This, in turn, leads to disk paging, which is extremely expensive in the context of scientific parallel computing. To solve this problem, we propose a new peer-to-peer solution called Parallel Network RAM. This approach avoids the use of disk and better utilizes available RAM resources. This approach will allow larger problems to be solved while reducing the computational, communication and synchronization overhead typically involved in parallel applications. 1.