SC21 Proceedings

The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis

Hardware-Supported Remote Persistence for Distributed Persistent Memory


Authors: Zhuohui Duan, Haodi Lu, Haikun Liu, Xiaofei Liao, Hai Jin, Yu Zhang, and Song Wu (Huazhong University of Science and Technology)

Abstract: The advent of Persistent Memory (PM) necessitates an evolution of Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) technologies for supporting remote data persistence. Previous software-based solutions require remote CPU intervention and postpone the visibility of remote persistence. In this paper, we design several hardware-supported RDMA primitives to flush data from the volatile cache of RDMA Network Interface Cards (RNICs) to the PM. We also propose durable RPCs based on the proposed RDMA Flush primitives to support remote data persistence and fast failure recovery. We emulate the performance of RDMA Flush primitives through other RDMA primitives, and compare our proposals with several state-of-the-art RPCs in a real testbed equipped with PM and InfiniBand networks. Experimental results show that our proposals can improve the throughput of RPCs by up to 90%, and reduce the 99th percentile latency by up to 49%. The experimental studies also provide instructive guidelines for designing RDMA-based distributed PM systems.


Presentation: file


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