Memory virtualization

[citation needed] With this capability integrated into the network, applications can take advantage of a very large amount of memory to improve overall performance, system utilization, increase memory usage efficiency, and enable new use cases.

Management software and the technologies of memory overcommitment manage shared memory, data insertion, eviction and provisioning policies, data assignment to contributing nodes, and handles requests from client nodes.

At the application level, the pool is accessed through an API or as a networked file system to create a high-speed shared memory cache.

At the operating system level, a page cache can utilize the pool as a very large memory resource that is much faster than local or networked storage.

In tandem with memory management innovations, a number of virtualization techniques have arisen to make the best use of available hardware resources.

Cluster implementing memory virtualization at the application level. Contributors 1...n contribute memory to the pool. Applications read and write data to the pool using Java or C APIs, or a file system API.

Cluster implementing memory virtualization. Contributors 1...n contribute memory to the pool. The operating system connects to the memory pool through the page cache system. Applications consume pooled memory via the operating system.