English

RDMAbox : Optimizing RDMA for Memory Intensive Workloads

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing 2021-08-17 v2

Abstract

We present RDMAbox, a set of low level RDMA optimizations that provide better performance than previous approaches. The optimizations are packaged in easy-to-use kernel and user space libraries for applications and systems in data center. We demonstrate the flexibility and effectiveness of RDMAbox by implementing a kernel remote paging system and a user space file system using RDMAbox. RDMAbox employs two optimization techniques. First, we suggest RDMA request merging and chaining to further reduce the total number of I/O operations to the RDMA NIC. The I/O merge queue at the same time functions as a traffic regulator to enforce admission control and avoid overloading the NIC. Second, we propose Adaptive Polling to achieve higher efficiency of polling Work Completion than existing busy polling while maintaining the low CPU overhead of event trigger. Our implementation of a remote paging system with RDMAbox outperforms existing representative solutions with up to 4? throughput improvement and up to 83% decrease in average tail latency in bigdata workloads, and up to 83% reduction in completion time in machine learning workloads. Our implementation of a user space file system based on RDMAbox achieves up to 5.9? higher throughput over existing representative solutions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2104.12197,
  title  = {RDMAbox : Optimizing RDMA for Memory Intensive Workloads},
  author = {Juhyun Bae and Ling Liu and Yanzhao Wu and Gong Su and Arun Iyengar},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2104.12197},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

10 pages, 12 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-24T01:29:51.561Z