Slashing the disaggregation tax in heterogeneous data centers with FractOS
Lluís Vilanova, Lina Maudlej, Shai Aviram Bergman, Till Miemietz, Matthias Hille, Nils Asmussen, Michael Roitzsch, Hermann Härtig, Mark Silberstein · 2022
Disaggregated heterogeneous data centers promise higher efficiency, lower total costs of ownership, and more flexibility for data-center operators. However, current software stacks can levy a high tax on application performance. Applications and OSes are designed for systems where local PCIe-connected devices are centrally managed by CPUs, but this centralization introduces unnecessary messages through the shared data-center network in a disaggregated system.