Remote memory in the age of fast networks
Marcos K. Aguilera, Nadav Amit, Irina Carmen Calciu, Xavier Deguillard, Jayneel Gandhi, Pratap Subrahmanyam, Lalith Suresh, Kiran Kumar Tati, Rajesh Venkatasubramanian, Michael Wei · 2017
As the latency of the network approaches that of memory, it becomes increasingly attractive for applications to use remote memory---random-access memory at another computer that is accessed using the virtual memory subsystem. This is an old idea whose time has come, in the age of fast networks. To work effectively, remote memory must address many technical challenges. In this paper, we enumerate these challenges, discuss their feasibility, explain how some of them are addressed by recent work, and indicate other promising ways to tackle them. Some challenges remain as open problems, while others deserve more study. In this paper, we hope to provide a broad research agenda around this topic, by proposing more problems than solutions.