Memory sharing for handling memory overload on physical machines in cloud data centers

Abstract

Over-committing computing resources is a widely adopted strategy for increased cluster utilization in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud data centers. A potential consequence of over-committing computing resources is memory overload of physical machines (PMs). Memory overload occurs if memory usage exceeds a defined alarm threshold, exposing running computation tasks at a risk of being terminated by the operating system. A prevailing measure to handle memory overload of a PM is live migration of virtual machines (VMs). However, this not only consumes network bandwidth, CPU, and other resources, but also compels a temporary unavailability of the VMs being migrated. To handle memory overload, we present a memory sharing system in this paper for PMs in cloud data centers. With memory sharing, a PM automatically borrows memory from a remote PM when necessary, and releases the borrowed memory when memory overload disappears. This is implemented through swapping inactive memory pages to remote memory resource. Experimental studies conducted on InfiniBand-networked PMs show that the memory sharing system is fully functional. The measured throughput and latency are around 929 Mbps and 1.3 mus, respectively, on average for remote memory access. They are similar to those from accessing a local-volatile memory express solid-state drive, and thus are promising in real applications.