PULSE: Accelerating Distributed Pointer-Traversals on Disaggregated Memory (Extended Version)

Abstract

Caches at CPU nodes in disaggregated memory architectures amortize the high data access latency over the network. However, such caches are fundamentally unable to improve performance for workloads requiring pointer traversals across linked data structures. We argue for accelerating these pointer traversals closer to disaggregated memory in a manner that preserves expressiveness for supporting various linked structures, ensures energy efficiency and performance, and supports distributed execution. We design PULSE, a distributed pointer-traversal framework for rack-scale disaggregated memory to meet all the above requirements. Our evaluation of PULSE shows that it enables low-latency, high-throughput, and energy-efficient execution for a wide range of pointer traversal workloads on disaggregated memory that fare poorly with caching alone.