Distributed shared persistent memory

Abstract

Next-generation non-volatile memories (NVMs) will provide byte addressability, persistence, high density, and DRAM-like performance. They have the potential to benefit many datacenter applications. However, most previous research on NVMs has focused on using them in a single machine environment. It is still unclear how to best utilize them in distributed, datacenter environments. We introduce Distributed Shared Persistent Memory (DSPM), a new framework for using persistent memories in distributed data-center environments. DSPM provides a new abstraction that allows applications to both perform traditional memory load and store instructions and to name, share, and persist their data. We built Hotpot, a kernel-level DSPM system that provides low-latency, transparent memory accesses, data persistence, data reliability, and high availability. The key ideas of Hotpot are to integrate distributed memory caching and data replication techniques and to exploit application hints. We implemented Hotpot in the Linux kernel and demonstrated its benefits by building a distributed graph engine on Hotpot and porting a NoSQL database to Hotpot. Our evaluation shows that Hotpot outperforms a recent distributed shared memory system by 1.3× to 3.2× and a recent distributed PM-based file system by 1.5× to 3.0×.