A distributed paging RAM grid system for wide-area memory sharing

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. © 2006 IEEE