Adaptive memory system over ethernet

  • Authors:

  • Jun Suzuki;Teruyuki Baba;Yoichi Hidaka;Junichi Higuchi;Nobuharu Kami;Satoshi Uchida;Masahiko Takahashi;Tomoyoshi Sugawara;Takashi Yoshikawa

  • Affiliations:

  • System Platforms Research Laboratories, NEC Corporation;System Platforms Research Laboratories, NEC Corporation;IP Network Division, NEC Corporation;System Platforms Research Laboratories, NEC Corporation;System Platforms Research Laboratories, NEC Corporation;2nd Computers Software Division, NEC Corporation;System Platforms Research Laboratories, NEC Corporation;System Platforms Research Laboratories, NEC Corporation;System Platforms Research Laboratories, NEC Corporation

  • Venue:
  • HotStorage'10 Proceedings of the 2nd USENIX conference on Hot topics in storage and file systems
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

For cloud computing, computer infrastructures need to be scaled up adaptively. However, their local memories cannot be expanded beyond the amount loaded to each computer. We present a method for scaling up of memory system beyond its local memory's capacity by high-speed page swapping using an adaptively attached solid-state disk (SSD) to a computer. Our PCI Express (PCIe) technology, "ExpEther" (Express Ether), interconnects a computer and a PCIe-based SSD via a standard Ethernet. The data transfer between the local memory of the computer and the SSD is performed without slow TCP/IP but with PCIe-standard direct memory access (DMA). It achieves IOPS of 33-K read and 36-K write for an access of 4-KB page size, which is twice as good as that for iSCSI with TCP-offloading. With the proposed method, a computer which only has 2-GB local physical memory can sustain its performance even when a 10-GB in-memory database is loaded.