Distributed caching with memcached
Linux Journal
Elastic online analytical processing on RAMCloud
Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Extending Database Technology
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We have developed a new memory architecture for clusters that allows automatic access from any processor to any memory module in the cluster completely by hardware. Thus, with a single assembly instruction a processor can retrieve (or update) a memory location in a remote node. The efficiency of this new paradigm makes it possible to speed-up the execution of shared-memory applications with very large memory footprints by running them across the entire cluster, thus providing them a true shared-memory environment (contrary to the emulation typically carried out by software-based distributed shared memory). This new memory architecture, referred to as MEMSCALE, opens up a new frontier for memory-hungry applications. In this paper we focus on in-memory databases and show how this target application can be boosted by our memory architecture, which can virtually provide unlimited memory resources to it. In the demo presented in this paper we show the advantages of our architecture by means of a prototype cluster. We configure two cluster sizes, 16 and 32 nodes, to analyze throughput scalability and latency worsening, to extrapolate these metrics to bigger clusters, and to show the benefits of our technology compared to other alternatives like SSD-based databases. Moreover, we also show the easiness of use of our architecture by explaining how we ported MySQL Server to our prototype cluster. Finally, the possibility of executing queries in any processor of the cluster during the live demo will show the audience how our system aggregates the advantages of the scale out and scale up approaches for database server growing.