Megalloc: Fast Distributed Memory Allocator for NVM-Based Cluster

Abstract

As the expected emerging Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) technologies, such as 3DXPoint, are in production, there has been a recent push in the big data processing community from storage-centric towards memory-centric. Generally, in large-scale systems, distributed memory management through traditional network with TCP/IP protocol exposes performance bottleneck. Briefly, CPU- centric network involves context switching, memory copy etc. Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) technology reveals the tremendous performance advantage over than TCP/IP: Allowing access to remote memory directly bypassing OS kernel. In this paper, we propose Megalloc, a distributed NVM allocator exposes NVMs as a shared address space of a cluster of machines based-on RDMA. Firstly, it makes memory allocation metadata accessed directly by each machine, allocating NVM in coarse-grained way; secondly, adopting fine-grained memory chunk for applications to read or store data; finally, it guarantees high distributed memory allocation performance.