Rethinking software runtimes for disaggregated memory

Abstract

Disaggregated memory can address resource provisioning inefficiencies in current datacenters. Multiple software runtimes for disaggregated memory have been proposed in an attempt to make disaggregated memory practical. These systems rely on the virtual memory subsystem to transparently offer disaggregated memory to applications using a local memory abstraction. Unfortunately, using virtual memory for disaggregation has multiple limitations, including high overhead that comes from the use of page faults to identify what data to fetch and cache locally, and high dirty data amplification that comes from the use of page-granularity for tracking changes to the cached data (4KB or higher).