DDC: A Vision for a Disaggregated Datacenter

TL;DR

This paper advocates for a shift to disaggregated datacenter architectures using high-performance protocols like CXL to improve resource utilization and flexibility, challenging traditional server-based designs.

Contribution

It presents a comprehensive vision for disaggregated datacenters, applying established architecture methodologies to address resource under-utilization issues.

Findings

Disaggregated datacenters can improve resource utilization.

High-performance protocols like CXL enable practical disaggregation.

A new architectural approach is proposed for future datacenters.

Abstract

Datacenters of today have maintained the same architecture for decades using the server as the primary building block. However, this traditional approach suffers from under-utilization of its resources, often caused by over-allocating these resources when deploying applications to accommodate worst-case scenarios. Specifically, servers can quickly drain their over-allocated memory resources while their CPUs are not fully utilized. This problem gives rise to a different school of thought, where resources are disaggregated instead of tightly bound to servers. This can address the utilization problem by allowing each type of resource to be allocated, utilized and freed separately as required. New high performance communication protocols, like CXL, could pave the way for practical implementations of resource disaggregation. In this article, we argue it is time to reconsider the datacenter architecture as a whole. We present our vision for a disaggregated datacenter aided by well-established computer architecture design methodologies.