OpenFAM: Programming disaggregated memory

Abstract

High performance computing (HPC) clusters are increasingly handling workloads where working data sets cannot be easily partitioned or are too large to fit into local node memory. In order to enable HPC workloads to access memory external to the node, HPE has defined a programming API (OpenFAM) for developing applications that use large‐scale disaggregated memory. In this paper we describe an open‐source reference implementation of OpenFAM that can be used on scale‐up machines, traditional HPC clusters, as well as emerging disaggregated memory architectures. We demonstrate the efficiency of the implementation using micro‐benchmarks on InfiniBand and Slingshot‐based clusters.