RDMA Extensions for Accelerating Remote PMEM Access - HW and SW Considerations, Architecture, and Programming Models

The SNIA Nonvolatile Memory Programing Model defines recommendations on how NVM behavior can be exposed to application software. There are Linux NVM library implementations that provide a rich set of interfaces which can be used by applications to improve their performance drastically on systems with NVM.

We analyzed these available interfaces and how it can be leveraged in typical applications. Our work demonstrates how a sample OpenSource Linux application can make use of these interfaces for improving performance. We also give examples of analyzing application code and finding out opportunity to use NVMp style interfaces. The sample application we would discuss is Linux Sqllite, and found 9 such opportunities to use Linux NVMP compatible interfaces. We also show how these storage optimizations can improve overall I/O and performance of such applications.

Learning Objectives

Introduce HW Architecture concepts of Intel platforms that will affect RDMA usages with PM
Introduce proposed high-level HW modifications that can be utilized to provide native HW support for pmem, reduce RDMA latency, and improve RDMA with pmem bandwidth
Focused discussion on proposed Linux libfabric and libibverb interface extensions and modification to support the proposed HW extensions Discuss open architecture issues and limitations with the proposed HW and SW extensions
Discuss Intel plans for standardization and industry review