MemNet: Enhancing Throughput and Energy Efficiency for Hybrid Workloads via Para-virtualized Memory Sharing
Chi Xu, Xiaoqiang Ma, Ryan Shea, Haiyang Wang, Jiangchuan Liu · 2016
Virtualization has become a building block for modern IT industry, and many datacenters are now highly virtualized. It is known that virtualization also introduces non-trivial overhead, which can cause severe self-interference inside a VM when CPU intensive tasks and bandwidth intensive tasks are co-located. Energy efficiency of the server can be affected as well. While such overhead is well-studied in application/protocol specific context, a more comprehensive solution is yet to be explored for general cloud services. In this paper, we present MemNet, a novel protocol-independent solution that enables para-virtualized memory sharing between host and guest VMs. This design successfully decouples I/O and computation operations and lifts the offered interface from the physical devices to high-level network services. Our real-world implementation on KVM indicates that, MemNet can achieve 27% and 70% gain in terms of computing and networking performance, respectively, by resolving the self-interference. It also provides 32% improvement in terms of energy efficiency.