More Exploration to Composable Infrastructure: The Application and Analysis of Composable Memory

摘要

Memory-Driven Computing facilitates real-world applications like in-memory database to benefit from substantial memory resources; however, these workloads perform dramatically downgraded if the memory capacity cannot reach to a threshold. In this paper, we present a novel remote memory system, which can handle memory-intensive workloads up to the scale of 1 Terabyte, by leveraging sophisticated tmpfs, virtual memory system, and Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) over Ethernet. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first design that provides (1) the most significant memory extension without any software modification and (2) the large-scale performance evaluations comparing to other state-of-the-art works about network-based remote memory. Based on the evaluation results, we believe the proposed composable memory is valuable for readers to re-visit wildly developed computing models (e.g., Apache Spark) and facilitate research work which can potentially reshape the data center architecture/deployment further.