RDMAvisor: Toward Deploying Scalable and Simple RDMA as a Service in Datacenters

TL;DR

RDMAvisor simplifies and scales RDMA deployment in datacenters by providing an adaptive, high-throughput RDMA as a Service that manages low-level details for easier application development.

Contribution

It introduces RDMAvisor, a scalable RaaS system that optimizes message buffer management and adaptive transport selection for better performance and simplicity.

Findings

Achieves high throughput with thousands of connections

Maintains low CPU and memory overhead

Provides a flexible programming model

Abstract

RDMA is increasingly adopted by cloud computing platforms to provide low CPU overhead, low latency, high throughput network services. On the other hand, however, it is still challenging for developers to realize fast deployment of RDMA-aware applications in the datacenter, since the performance is highly related to many lowlevel details of RDMA operations. To address this problem, we present a simple and scalable RDMA as Service (RaaS) to mitigate the impact of RDMA operational details. RaaS provides careful message buffer management to improve CPU/memory utilization and improve the scalability of RDMA operations. These optimized designs lead to simple and flexible programming model for common and knowledgeable users. We have implemented a prototype of RaaS, named RDMAvisor, and evaluated its performance on a cluster with a large number of connections. Our experiment results demonstrate that RDMAvisor achieves high throughput for thousand of connections and maintains low CPU and memory overhead through adaptive RDMA transport selection.