Dario Korolija gives an invited talk at Microsoft, Redmond (WA), USA

Dario Korolija gave a talk on "Disaggregated Memory with Operator Off-loading for Database Engines" at Microsoft in Washington, USA.

Abstract:


Cloud deployments disaggregate storage from compute, providing more flexibility to both the storage and compute layers. We explore disaggregation by taking it one step further and applying it to memory (DRAM).

Disaggregated memory uses network attached DRAM as a way to decouple memory
from CPU. In the context of databases, such a design offers significant advantages in terms of making a larger memory capacity available as a central pool to a collection of smaller processing nodes. To explore these possibilities, we have implemented an open source platform designed to explore disaggregated memory solutions for databases, operating as a remote buffer cache with operator offloading capabilities.


The platform is implemented as an FPGA-based smart NIC making DRAM available as a disaggregated, network attached memory pool capable of performing data processing at line rate over data streams to/from disaggregated memory. It supports query offloading using traditional operators such as selection, projection, aggregation, regular expression matching and encryption.


We show that our solution is competitive with a local buffer cache solutions for all the workloads and outperforms it in a number of cases, proving that a smart disaggregated memory can be a viable alternative for databases deployed in cloud environments.