R&D: Efficiently Enlarging RDMA-Attached Memory with SSD

ACM Transactions on Storage has published an article written by Zhe Yang, Qing Wang, Xiaojian Liao, Youyou Lu, Keji Huang, and Jiwu Shu, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.

Abstract: “RDMA-based in-memory storage systems offer high performance but are restricted by the capacity of physical memory. In this paper, we propose TeRM to extend RDMA-attached memory with SSD. TeRM achieves fast remote access on the SSD-extended memory by eliminating page faults of RDMA NIC and CPU from the critical path. We also introduce a set of techniques to reduce the consumption of CPU and network resources. Evaluation shows that TeRM performs close to the performance of the ideal upper bound where all pages are pinned in the physical memory. Compared with existing approaches TeRM significantly improves the performance of unmodified RDMA-based storage systems, including a file system and a key-value system.“