Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Clock Synchronization

Stanko Novakovic

Richendra Khanna

Dushyanth Narayanan

Miguel Castro

Anders Tungeland Gjerdrum

Aleksandar Dragojevic

Alexander Shamis

Matthew Renzelmann

Georgios Chatzopoulos

Ishwar Agarwal

Ricardo Gouvea Bianchini

Vishal Soni

Lisa Ru-feng Hsu

Daniel Sebastian Berger

Sameh Elnikety

Janaina Barreiro Gambaro Bueno

Aninda Manocha

Íñigo Goiri Presa

The present disclosure relates to systems, methods, and computer-readable media for tracking memory usage data on a memory controller system and providing a mechanism whereby one or multiple accessing agents (e.g., computing nodes, applications, virtual machines) can access memory usage data for a memory resource managed by a memory controller. Indeed, the systems described herein facilitate generation of and access to heatmaps having memory usage data thereon. The systems described herein describe features and functionality related to generating and maintaining the heatmaps as well as providing access to the heatmaps to a variety of accessing agents. This memory tracking and accessing is performed using low processing overhead while providing useful information to accessing agents in connection with memory resources managed by a memory controller.

Managing and ranking memory resources

Systems and methods related to harvesting of the unused resources in a distributed computing system are described. An example method, in a system including a host server, having a first instruction set architecture (ISA), and an interface card, having a second ISA is provided. The method includes designating at least one type of resource, associated with the host server for harvesting by compute entities configured for execution using the processor having the second ISA, where the host server is configured to execute compute entities requiring execution by the processor having the first ISA. The method further includes in response to a request for accessing the at least one type of resource by a compute entity, executing on the processor having the second ISA, automatically allowing the compute entity to access the at least one type of resource associated with the host server.

Harvesting unused resources in a distributed computing system

In various examples, there is provided methods performed by nodes in a cluster of nodes to establish a master clock at a new master node following a reconfiguration of the nodes included in the cluster, whereby the master clock is provided by an old master node prior to the reconfiguration, and synchronize a local clock of slave nodes to clock of the new master node. The new master node sends a message to the slave nodes instructing them to disable their respective local clocks, receives acknowledgements that the local clocks have been disabled, waits until a time at which all leases have expired for any nodes removed from the cluster, sets the value of its clock to be greater than a maximum value that could have been provided by the old master node at the time the leases expired and indicates to the other nodes to re-enable their local clocks.

Clock synchronization

In various examples, there is provided methods performed by nodes in a cluster of nodes for performing transactions comprising one or more read operations and/or one or more write operations. The node comprises a local clock which is synchronized with a master clock and maintains a measure of uncertainty indicating current minimum and maximum values of the master clock. The method to perform transactions involving read operations generates a read timestamp representing a point in time which is earlier than a current minimum value of the master clock. The method then reads the objects and determines, for each of them, whether a timestamp associated with that object is later than the read timestamp. If so, an error handling procedure is performed for that object.

Performing transactions in distributed transactional memory systems

Growing community of inventors

Cambridge, United Kingdom

Stanko Novakovic