Architectural Support for Efficient Data Movement in Fully Disaggregated Systems

Abstract

Traditional data centers include monolithic servers that tightly integrate CPU, memory and disk (Figure 1a). Instead, Disaggregated Systems (DSs) [8, 13, 18, 27] organize multiple compute (CC), memory (MC) and storage devices as independent, failure-isolated components interconnected over a high-bandwidth network (Figure 1b). DSs can greatly reduce data center costs by providing improved resource utilization, resource scaling, failure-handling and elasticity in modern data centers [5, 8-10, 10, 11, 13, 18, 27] The MCs provide large pools of main memory (remote memory), while the CCs include the on-chip caches and a few GBs of DRAM (local memory) that acts as a cache of remote memory. In this context, a large fraction of the application's data (~ 80%) [8, 18, 27] is located in remote memory, and can cause large performance penalties from remotely accessing data over the network.