CS736 Project Suggestions from Prof. David Wood and Prof. Mark Hill:

Benchmarking and Refining Reactive NUMA on WildFire

Our department is the owner of an experimental "beta" machine from Sun Microsystem called "WildFire." WildFire unifies four symmetric multiprocessors (SMPs) so they behave like a single machine. This is done by replacing a processor board on each machine with a board that acts like a proxy for the rest of the system. Wildfire can dynamically switch pages between acting like a Cache-Coherent Non-Uniform Memory Access (CC-NUMA) machine to acting as a Simple Cache Only Memory Access (S-COMA) machine and back. The algorithm uses is a variant of the competitive Reactive NUMA (R-NUMA) developed by Falsafi and Wood [International Symposium on Computer Architecture, 1997]. It is implemented with low-level platform-specific modification to Solaris (in the HAT layer of the VM system). Policies and mechanisms are separated.

Our big WildFire has 64 processors, 8GB memory, and 1TB disk. An interesting project would be to study behavior of the existing algorithm with microbenchmarks and applications and then to propose or make changes. If interested, please talk to Prof. David Wood (david@cs.wisc.edu) or Prof. Mark Hill (markhill@cs.wisc.edu).