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Dissertation Defense - Ming-Chit Tam
From: David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>
Date: Sat, 30 Apr 1994 08:40:25 -0400
CapNet - Using a Gigabit Network as a High Speed Backplane Dissertation Defense Ming-Chit Tam With their vast amount of bandwidth, Gigabit networks have effec- tively shrunk communication delays to that of light wave propaga- tion, opening the long waited opportunity to distribute applica- tions across a wide area network. By connecting a number of high performance computers together with a gigabit network, and pro- viding hardware and software supports for a virtual memory shared among these computers, we have effectively created a geographi- cally dispersed multiprocessor with a high speed but also high latency backplane. The key to realize this system is to reduce the effect of la- tency as much as possible. While caching and replications are well-known techniques to reduce memory access latency, they re- quire mobile data and their copies to be located to maintain data consistency. CapNet addresses this problem in the context of a wide area network by embedding a set of intelligent mechanisms into the network. Our approach is to distribute the location in- formation of memory objects and their copies into the network switches so that the network can actively support cache coherence protocols. In CapNet, a write miss is handled by directly multi- casting invalidations to the memory object copies which then send back their acknowledgments. A read miss is handled by replicating a copy from the copy holder that is geographically closest to the requesting host, thereby reducing the traveling time of the re- quest and its reply to a minimal. Our approach reduces write fault delays by as much as 30% and read fault delays by 50% in compare to the more popular directory based approach. Supervisor: David J. Farber Committee : Ruzena Bajcsy Hiromichi Hashizume (NACSIS) Keith Ross Jonathan Smith (Chair) DSL Conference Room, Moore School 9:00 am on 2 May 1994. _______________________________________________________________________________
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