TH-DPMS

The rapidly increasing data in recent years requires the datacenter infrastructure to store and process data with extremely high throughput and low latency. Fortunately, persistent memory (PM) and RDMA technologies bring new opportunities towards this goal. Both of them are capable of delivering more than 10 GB/s of bandwidth and sub-microsecond latency. However, our past experiences and recent studies show that it is non-trivial to build an efficient and distributed storage system with such new hardware. In this article, we design and implement TH-DPMS (TsingHua Distributed Persistent Memory System) based on persistent memory and RDMA, which unifies the memory, file system, and key-value interface in a single system. TH-DPMS is designed based on a unified distributed persistent memory abstract, pDSM. pDSM acts as a generic layer to connect the PMs of different storage nodes via high-speed RDMA network and organizes them into a global shared address space. It provides the fundamental functionalities, including global address management, space management, fault tolerance, and crash consistency guarantees. Applications are enabled to access pDSM with a group of flexible and easy-to-use APIs by using either raw read/write interfaces or the transactional ones with ACID guarantees. Based on pDSM, we implement a distributed file system and a key-value store named pDFS and pDKVS, respectively. Together, they uphold TH-DPMS with high-performance, low-latency, and fault-tolerant data storage. We evaluate TH-DPMS with both micro-benchmarks and real-world memory-intensive workloads. Experimental results show that TH-DPMS is capable of delivering an aggregated bandwidth of 120 GB/s with 6 nodes. When processing memory-intensive workloads such as YCSB and Graph500, TH-DPMS improves the performance by one order of magnitude compared to existing systems and keeps consistent high efficiency when the workload size grows to multiple terabytes.