Our discussions led us to a idea of network memmory AND a network process
space (a lot like a Beowulf). Our ideas take this one step further, why
not make the network address space part of the virtual memmory system?
The idea I'm getting at is that if a machine decided it is to busy to continue
running a given process it will ship the active page off to another machine
(with the other necessary process structures) This machine would then run
in the current page until it needed another page, at which time it would
request that page from the originating machine as if it was coming from swap.
The only problem that we really see with this is that you could also slip into
the line of thought of "Why not use this other machines memmory as swap space?"
if you do that then you start running in to the situation where a machine has
started to swap out a process to machine A, then it decides it wants to
ship the process off to a machien B, and now some pages are spread across
mutilple machines, which would be hard to account for. In otherwords we
havn't figured out how to handle the page accounting when differnt machines
hold differnt pages.
These are just some of our idle time thinking. These may not be new, but we had
fun discovering them for ourselves :o)
Jim Leu:jleu@doit.wisc.edu
Dave Plonka:plonka@doit.wisc.edu
-- DoIT - Net Engineering University of Wiscosin Madison