System-level implications of disaggregated memory

Recent research on memory disaggregation introduces a new architectural building block—the memory blade—as a cost-effective approach for memory capacity expansion and sharing for an ensemble of blade servers. Memory blades augment blade servers’ local memory capacity with a second-level (remote) memory that can be dynamically apportioned among blades in response to changing capacity demand, albeit at a higher access latency. In this paper, we build on the prior research to explore the software and systems implications of disaggregated memory. We develop a software-based prototype by extending the Xen hypervisor to emulate a disaggregated memory design wherein remote pages are swapped into local memory on-demand upon access. Our prototyping effort reveals that low-latency remote memory calls for a different regime of replacement policies than conventional disk paging, favoring minimal hypervisor overhead even at the cost of using less sophisticated replacement policies. Second, w...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: HPCA
• Authors: Kevin T. Lim, Yoshio Turner, Jose Renato Santos, Alvin AuYoung, Jichuan Chang, Parthasarathy Ranganathan, Thomas F. Wenisch
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, HPCA 2012, Prototyping Effort, Sophisticated Replacement, Xen Hypervisor