DSG Seminar Series • A Remote Dynamic Memory Cache Using Spot VMs

Speaker: Philip Bernstein, Microsoft Research

Location: Over zoom

Abstract:

Data management systems are hungry for main memory, and cloud data centers are awash in it. But that memory is not always easily accessible and often too expensive. To bridge this gap, we propose a new cloud service that allows a data-intensive system to opportunistically offload its in-memory data, and computation over that data, to a remote cache. Each cache is a byte-array hosted by multiple VMs – spot VMs when possible or statically provisioned VMs when not. We built two prototypes of the service: Redy and CompuCache.

• Redy uses RDMA for fast reads and writes on the remote cache. It automatically customizes the resource configuration for the given SLO. Its performance is significantly better than server-local SSD.
• CompuCache uses eRPC to execute stored procedures on the cache server, distributing each stored procedure execution across the instances. It executes 126 million stored procedure invocations per second on one VM with 16 threads.

Both prototypes handle dynamic reassignment of remote memory regions and recovery from failures. This is joint work with Qizhen Zhang, published at VLDB 2022 and CIDR 2022.

Bio: Philip A. Bernstein is a Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research and an Affiliate Professor at University of Washington. He was previously a product architect at Microsoft and Digital Equipment Corp., a professor at Harvard University and Wang Institute of Graduate Studies, and a VP Software at Sequoia Systems. He has published over 150 papers and two books on the theory and implementation of database systems, especially on transaction processing and data integration, and has contributed to a variety of database products. He is a Fellow of the ACM and AAAS, a winner of the E.F. Codd SIGMOD Innovations Award, and a member of the Washington State Academy of Sciences and the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. He received a B.S. degree from Cornell and M.Sc. and Ph.D. from University of Toronto.