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USENIX Technical Program - Abstract - Windows NT Symposium 99
Windows NT in a ccNUMA System
B. Brock, G. Carpenter, E. Chiprout, E. Elnozahy, M. Dean, D. Glasco, J. Peterson, R. Rajamony, F. Rawson, R. Rockhold, and A. Zimmerman, IBM Austin Research Laboratory
Abstract
We have built a 16-way, ccNUMA multiprocessor prototype to study the
feasibility of building large scale servers out of Standard High
Volume (SHV) components. Using a cache-coherent interconnect, our
prototype combines four 4-processor SMPs built using 350MHz Intel
Xeon™ processors, yielding a 16-way system with a
total of 4 GBytes of physical memory distributed over the nodes. Such
an environment poses several performance challenges to Windows
NT®, which assumes that memory is equidistant to all
processors. To overcome these problems, we have implemented an
abstraction called a Resource Set, which allows threads to
specify their execution and memory affinity across the ccNUMA complex.
We used a suite of parallel applications to evaluate the
scalability and performance of the system. Our results confirm the
feasibility of building ccNUMA systems out of SHV components, and
suggest that memory allocation affinity should be incorporated as part
of the standard Windows NT API. Also, the performance degradation due
to poor bus bandwidth in the current generation of Intel-based
processors often dominates the degradation due to the latency of
remote memory accesses.
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