Patent ID: 7426622

Claim:
A method of rapidly selecting a physical memory locality in response to a memory fault event to accomplish efficient memory allocation in a multiprocessor system which includes a plurality of cells and shared memory distributed across the cells, wherein each cell includes at least a portion of the shared memory, the method comprising: receiving from a requesting processor in one of said cells a request to access a virtual memory address; checking for a translation of said virtual memory address to a corresponding physical address; and if said translation is not found, then performing steps of: sending a locality request to a virtual memory fault handler, the locality request including an indication of a search policy to use from among a plurality of search policies; forming a data structure based on physical memory localities at the cells within the system and the search policy that was indicated, said data structure including sets of equidistant physical memory localities from said requesting processor; and selecting a preferred physical memory locality using a pointer to a locality within said data structure.