Adaptive memory system over ethernet
Jun Suzuki, 輝幸 馬場, Yoichi Hidaka, Junichi Higuchi, Nobuharu Kami, S. Uchida, Masahiko Takahashi, Tomoyoshi Sugawara, Takashi Yoshikawa · USENIX conference on Hot topics in storage and file systems · 2010
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.