Transaction Architecture for CXL Memory
Christopher Zhou, Ellis R. Giles, Peter Varman · 2024
With the recent explosive growth in worldwide data processing demands, the need to support a large volume of transactions on shared data is increasing in both edge and datacenter processing.A recent innovation in server architectures is the use of disaggregated memory based on the Compute eXpress Link (CXL) interconnect protocol.Such memory architectures are increasingly popular in datacenters, as they allow dynamic demand-sensitive resizing of aggregated memory and support heterogeneous memory types.However, while this alleviates many concerns in datacenter architectures, ensuring data integrity when using memory based transactions over CXL faces many challenges.We describe a novel hardware-based scheme for providing ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) transactions in a CXL-based disaggregated memory architecture.The architecture and protocol presented in this paper requires only simple hardware extensions, and is applicable to both persistent memory durable transactions or in-memory volatile transactions.