Dr. Xiaosong Ma, from North Carolina State University, gave a report on NVMalloc: Exposing an Aggregate SSD Store as a Memory Partition in Extreme-Scale Machines, on June8, in the 446 Conference Room of ICT. This talk was invited and hosted by Researcher Jin Xiong at Advanced Computer Systems Laboratory.

Dr. Ma introduced technologies in exploiting NVM as a secondary memory partition so that applications can explicitly allocate and manipulate memory regions therein.

Firstly, Dr. Ma gave an introduction of the situation that DRAM is a precious resource in extreme-scale machines and is increasingly becoming scarce, mainly due to the growing number of cores per node. Then she talked about their approach. They propose an NVMalloc library with a suite of services that enables applications to access a distributed NVM storage system. After that, she presented the experiments they conducted on a 128-core cluster to prove that NVMalloc enables applications to compute problem sizes larger than the physical memory in a cost-effective manner. Finally, she briefly introduced another two of their recent projects.

After the report, attendees discussed about the details of exploiting NVM as a secondary memory, and other relative issues.