Support for recoverable memory in the distributed virtual communication machine

Abstract

The Distributed Virtual Communication Machine (DVCM) is a software communication architecture for clusters of workstations equipped with programmable network interfaces (NIs) for high-speed networks. DVCM is an extensible architecture, which promotes the transfer of application modules to the NI. By executing `closer' to the network, on the NI CoProcessor, these modules can communicate with significantly higher message rates and lower latencies than achievable at the CPU-level. This paper describes how DVCM modules can be used to enhance the performance of the Cluster Recoverable Memory system (CRMem), a transaction-processing kernel for memory-resident databases. By using the NI CoProcessor for CRMem's remote operations, our implementation achieves more than 3,000 trans/sec on a simplified TpcB benchmark.