Technische Universität München, Fakultät für Informatik
Lehrstuhl für Rechnertechnik und Rechnerorganisation
(LRR-TUM)

Diplomarbeit

Physical-virtual address transformation based on SCI

Work Description

Growing complexity of hardware makes performance evaluation and characterization more difficult, especially for PC-Cluster with DSM character. The challenge is to design a powerful performance monitor which is able to deliver detailed information about the run-time communication behavior and to help the run-time system make correct decisions concerning partition and redistribution of data and threads. Such a monitor has been developed for the SMiLE (Shared Memory in a LAN-like Environment) project at LRR-TUM.

The monitor is used to trace transactions performed on the SMiLE clusters connected with the Scalable Coherent Interface (SCI), an IEEE standardized system area network with the character of very low latency and high bandwidth. The monitored data, however, is purely based on physical addresses, which are not directly used by the user. On the other hand, the user has to use physical addresses to define events and configure the hardware monitor. The transformation between physical addresses and virtual addresses is necessary. The work included in this Diplomarbeit aims at mapping the physical addresses extracted from the monitored data to the virtual addresses visible for the user, and vice versa. This work can be done with the help of the SCI-VM, a global virtual memory on top of the hardware monitor supporting for shared memory programming.

Environment

PC-Cluster with Linux Operating System

Qualification

Linux and programming (Java or C, C++) knowledge.

Jie Tao, 18. February 2001