Memory Servers: A Scope of SOA for High-End Computing

Abstract

The expanding gap between microprocessor and disk performance has initiated new techniques of providing memory as a service in high-end computing (HEC). Although the processor and disk densities have improved over the last decades, the improvement of disk performance is inferior to that of processors, which is causing a bottleneck for HEC. With the rapid growth of network technology for cluster computers, the idea of accessing memory of an idle peer node has proven to be faster than accessing a disk. With this motivation, many researchers developed systems that offer idle memory as a service. In this paper, we present a brief survey of various systems that offer memory service in improving the disk access performance and discuss the scope of applying service oriented architecture (SOA) for HEC