Adding flexibility to a remote memory pager

Traditional operating systems use magnetic disks as paging devices, although the cost of each page fault measured in processor cycles continues to increase. In this paper we argue that applications should be given the opportunity to use as backing store either magnetic disk or the memory of idle workstations within the same LAN. We have implemented a pager that provides this flexibility, measured its performance over an Ethernet, and found it to be superior to traditional disk paging. We conclude that as the available network bandwidth increases, the use of network memory as backing store becomes a even more attractive alternative