Parallella Community

I currently have an 8-node cluster and was wondering if there is a way to pool the all the RAM into one large shared memory (i.e. adding all 1 gbs of RAM to one 8 gb RAM).

Can anyone speak to this or point me in the direction of posts that I've yet to find?

Thanks!

Well, if you ignore the Epiphany chip (which cannot access all of that memory anyway), a Parallella is just another Linux system. So look at other Linux clustering solutions.

The Epiphany architecture is a 32-bit architecture and can only address 4 GB of memory in total. If you need more address space, you have to implement some kind of mapping yourself, which drags down performance. On the Parallella board, the single Epiphany chip can only access 32 MB of memory, not the full 1 GB.

Also, the available bandwidth between these 32 MB of RAM and the Epiphany chip is much lower than the available bandwidth inside each Epiphany chip, and the latency introduced by connecting multiple Parallellas through the network interface is not going to help either.

In other words, it might make sense to provide a big machine on the network, which provides data slices on demand to all Parallella systems on the network. There is no need to keep the data in RAM, since any SSD is able to saturate multiple network links simultaneously - which is not true for the SD cards. Then write your Parallella host program to fetch these data slices and feed them into the Epiphany systems as you need. 8 GB of data is not too large for a single system.