Disaggregated Memory with SmartNIC Offloading: a Case Study on Graph Processing

TL;DR

This paper introduces SODA, a SmartNIC-based architecture for disaggregated memory that enhances graph processing performance and reduces network traffic by offloading memory management tasks to programmable SmartNICs.

Contribution

It presents a novel architecture and prototype implementation that offloads memory management to SmartNICs, improving performance and efficiency in disaggregated memory systems.

Findings

SODA achieves up to 7.9x speedup over SSD-based systems.

Reduces network traffic by 42% compared to non-offloaded disaggregated memory.

Improves graph processing performance on real-world datasets.

Abstract

Disaggregated memory breaks the boundary of monolithic servers to enable memory provisioning on demand. Using network-attached memory to provide memory expansion for memory-intensive applications on compute nodes can improve the overall memory utilization on a cluster and reduce the total cost of ownership. However, current software solutions for leveraging network-attached memory must consume resources on the compute node for memory management tasks. Emerging off-path smartNICs provide general-purpose programmability at low-cost low-power cores. This work provides a general architecture design that enables network-attached memory and offloading tasks onto off-path programmable SmartNIC. We provide a prototype implementation called SODA on Nvidia BlueField DPU. SODA adapts communication paths and data transfer alternatives, pipelines data movement stages, and enables customizable data caching and prefetching optimizations. We evaluate SODA in five representative graph applications on real-world graphs. Our results show that SODA can achieve up to 7.9x speedup compared to node-local SSD and reduce network traffic by 42% compared to disaggregated memory without SmartNIC offloading at similar or better performance.