Resource abstraction and data placement for distributed hybrid memory pool

Emerging byte-addressable non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies offer higher density and lower cost than DRAM, at the expense of lower performance and limited write endurance. There have been many studies on hybrid NVM/DRAM memory management in a single physical server. However, it is still an open problem on how to manage hybrid memories efficiently in a distributed environment. This paper proposes Alloy, a memory resource abstraction and data placement strategy for an RDMA-enabled distributed hybrid memory pool (DHMP). Alloy provides simple APIs for applications to utilize DRAM or NVM resource in the DHMP, without being aware of the hardware details of the DHMP. We propose a hotness-aware data placement scheme, which combines hot data migration, data replication and write merging together to improve application performance and reduce the cost of DRAM. We evaluate Alloy with several micro-benchmark workloads and public benchmark workloads. Experimental results show that Alloy can significantly reduce the DRAM usage in the DHMP by up to 95%, while reducing the total memory access time by up to 57% compared with the state-of-the-art approaches.