Network in Disaggregated Datacenters

TL;DR

This paper explores disaggregated datacenter architectures, extending the LegoOS operating system to support disaggregated networking, demonstrating the feasibility and benefits of resource disaggregation including network resources.

Contribution

It extends LegoOS to include disaggregated networking, showing that network resources can be managed independently and optimized similarly to CPU and RAM.

Findings

Disaggregated networking is feasible within LegoOS architecture.

Classical networking optimizations can be implemented in disaggregated environments.

The approach shows promising performance and management benefits.

Abstract

Nowadays, datacenters lean on a computer-centric approach based on monolithic servers which include all necessary hardware resources (mainly CPU, RAM, network and disks) to run applications. Such an architecture comes with two main limitations: (1) difficulty to achieve full resource utilization and (2) coarse granularity for hardware maintenance. Recently, many works investigated a resource-centric approach called disaggregated architecture where the datacenter is composed of self-content resource boards interconnected using fast interconnection technologies, each resource board including instances of one resource type. The resource-centric architecture allows each resource to be managed (maintenance, allocation) independently. LegoOS is the first work which studied the implications of disaggregation on the operating system, proposing to disaggregate the operating system itself. They demonstrated the suitability of this approach, considering mainly CPU and RAM resources. However, they didn't study the implication of disaggregation on network resources. We reproduced a LegoOS infrastructure and extended it to support disaggregated networking. We show that networking can be disaggregated following the same principles, and that classical networking optimizations such as DMA, DDIO or loopback can be reproduced in such an environment. Our evaluations show the viability of the approach and the potential of future disaggregated infrastructures.