Exploiting Remote Memory Operations to Design Efficient Reconfiguration for Shared Data-Centers over InfiniBand
Pavan Balaji, Karthik Vaidyanathan, Sundeep Narravula, K.K. Savitha, Hyun‐Wook Jin, Dhabaleswar K. DK Panda · 2004
reconfigurability of the nodes in the data-center environment. This technique enables the nodes in the datacenter environment to efficiently adapt their functionality based on the system load and traffic pattern. While reconfigurability is a widely used technique for clusters, the datacenter environment poses several interesting challenges for the design and implementation of such a scheme. In our approach, we use the advanced features of InfiniBand such as Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) operations and network based atomic operations to tackle these challenges in an efficient manner without requiring any modifications to the existing data-center applications. Our experimental results show that the reconfigurability scheme provides a significantly higher performance (up to a factor of 2.5 improvement in the throughput) with the same resources or provides a similar performance while using fewer resources (up to half the nodes) as compared to a rigidly configured data-center. More importantly, our scheme takes advantage of the one-sided communication primitives offered by InfiniBand making it resilient and well-conditioned to the load on the servers as compared to two-sided communication protocols such as TCP/IP (sockets).