ODRP: On-Demand Remote Paging with Programmable RDMA

Memory disaggregation with OS swapping is becoming popular for next-generation datacenters. RDMA is a promising technique for achieving this. However, RDMA does not support dynamic memory management in the data path. Current systems rely on RDMA’s control path operations, which are designed for coarse-grained memory management. This results in a trade-off between performance and memory utilization and also requires significant CPU usage, which is a limited resource on memory nodes.

This paper introduces On-Demand Remote Paging, the first system that smartly chains native RDMA data path primitives to offload all memory access and management operations onto the RDMA-capable NIC (RNIC). However, efficiently implementing these operations is challenging due to the limited capability of RNIC. ODRP leverages the semantics of OS swapping and adopts a client-assisted principle to address the efficiency and functionality challenges. Compared to the state-of-the-art system, ODRP can achieve significantly better memory utilization, no CPU usage while introducing only a 0.8% to 14.6% performance overhead in real-world applications.