MIND: In-Network Memory Management for Disaggregated Data Centers

Abstract

Memory disaggregation promises transparent elasticity, high resource utilization, and hardware heterogeneity in data centers by physically separating memory and compute into network-attached resource blades. Existing designs, however, achieve performance at the cost of resource elasticity by restricting memory sharing to a single compute blade to avoid costly memory-coherence traffic. This work shows that emerging programmable network switches can enable an efficient shared-memory abstraction by placing memory-management logic in the network fabric. Centralizing memory management permits bandwidth- and latency-efficient in-network cache coherence while programmable switch ASICs support other management logic at line rate. MIND realizes these ideas as an in-network memory-management unit for rack-scale disaggregation, providing transparent resource elasticity while matching the performance of prior disaggregation proposals on real-world workloads.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{mind,
  author = {Lee, Seung-seob and Yu, Yanpeng and Tang, Yupeng and Khandelwal, Anurag and Zhong, Lin and Bhattacharjee, Abhishek},
  title = {{MIND: In-Network Memory Management for Disaggregated Data Centers}},
  year = {2021},
  mon = {October},
  booktitle = {ACM SOSP}
}