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Showing posts from April, 2017

A paper a day keeps the dr away: FaRM -- Fast Remote Memory

Distributed systems have allowed applications to use more computation power, memory, and physical storage than is available on a single machine, enabling applications to tackle more complex problems. The capacity increase however comes at a cost: accessing remote resources is slower than accessing ones that are local to the machine. The paper “ FaRM:Fast Remote Memory ” tries to address the cost of accessing remote memory, and ways to make it faster. The authors start by acknowledging that the major cost of accessing remote memory is the networking cost between machines through the TCP/IP stack, and that faster networks could do so much. They cite the case of MemC3—a state of the art key-value store—which performed 7x worse in a client-server setup than in a single machine setup, despite request batching. The authors ask the question if the TCP/IP stack overhead is that high, what if you bypass the complex protocol stacks, and use RDMA—remote direct memory access—to access memory