Abstract-Current datacenters are based on server machines, whose mainboard and hardware components form the baseline, monolithic building block that the rest of the system software, middleware and application stack are built upon. This leads to the following limitations: (a) resource proportionality of a multitray system is bounded by the basic building block (mainboard), (b) resource allocation to processes or virtual machines (VMs) is bounded by the available resources within the boundary of the mainboard, leading to spare resource fragmentation and inefficiencies, and (c) upgrades must be applied to each and every server even when only a specific component needs to be upgraded. The dRedBox project (Disaggregated Recursive Datacentre-ina-Box) addresses the above limitations, and proposes the next generation, low-power, across form-factor datacenters, departing from the paradigm of the mainboard-as-a-unit and enabling the creation of function-block-as-a-unit. Hardware-level disaggregation and software-defined wiring of resources is supported by a full-fledged Type-1 hypervisor that can execute commodity virtual machines, which communicate over a low-latency and high-throughput software-defined optical network. To evaluate its novel approach, dRedBox will demonstrate application execution in the domains of network functions virtualization, infrastructure analytics, and real-time video surveillance.

Disaggregation and rack-scale systems have the potential of drastically increasing TCO and utilization of cloud datacenters, while maintaining performance. In this paper, we present a novel rack-scale system architecture featuring softwaredefined remote memory disaggregation. Our hardware design and operating system extensions enable unmodified applications to dynamically attach to memory segments residing on physically remote memory pools and use such remote segments in a byteaddressable manner, as if they were local to the application. Our system features also a control plane that automates softwaredefined dynamic matching of compute to memory resources, as driven by datacenter workload needs. We prototyped our system on the commercially available Zynq Ultrascale+ MPSoC platform. To our knowledge, this is the first time a software-defined disaggregated system has been prototyped on commercial hardware and evaluated through industry standard software benchmarks. Our initial resultsusing benchmarks that are artificially highly adversarial in terms of memory bandwidth-show that disaggregated memory access exhibits a round-trip latency of only 134 clock cycles; and a throughput penalty of as low as 55%, relative to locally-attached memory. We also discuss estimations as to how our findings may translate to applications with pragmatically milder memory aggressiveness levels, as well as innovation avenues across the stack opened up by our work.

This paper showcases the first experimental demonstration of disaggregated memory using the dReDBox optical Data Centre architecture. Experimental results demonstrate the 4-tier network scalability and performance of the system at the physical and application layer.

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