Linux on NUMA

Martin Bligh, Matt Dobson, Darren Hart, Gerrit Huizenga

NUMA is becoming more widespread in the marketplace, used on many systems, small or large, particularly with the advent of AMD Opteron systems. This paper will cover a summary of the current state of NUMA, and future developments, encompassing the VM subsystem, scheduler, topology (cpu, memory, IO layouts including complex non-uniform layouts), userspace interface APIs, and network and disk IO locality. It will take a broad-based approach, focusing on the challenges of creating subsystems that work for all machines (including amd64, ppc64, ia32, ia64, etc), rather than just one architecture.