Patent · US Active

Centralized adaptive network memory engine

US7925711B1 · kind B1 · utility

62Cited by
8References
10Claims
0Family size

Assignee

Inventors

Key dates

Filing dateDec 15, 2007
Grant dateApr 12, 2011
Priority date
Expiry dateJul 22, 2028

Classification

  • Technology area (CPC H)Electricity
  • CPC primaryH04L67/568
  • WIPO fieldDigital communication
  • WIPO sectorElectrical engineering

Abstract

There is a constant battle to break even between continuing improvements in DRAM capacities and the growing memory demands of large-memory high-performance applications. Performance of such applications degrades quickly once the system hits the physical memory limit and starts swapping to the local disk. We present the design, implementation and evaluation of Anemone—an Adaptive Network Memory Engine—that virtualizes the collective unused memory of multiple machines across a gigabit Ethernet LAN, without requiring any modifications to the either the large memory applications or the Linux kernel. We have implemented a working prototype of Anemone and evaluated it using real-world unmodified applications such as ray-tracing and large in-memory sorting. Our results with the Anemone prototype show that unmodified single-process applications execute 2 to 3 times faster and multiple concurrent processes execute 6 to 7.7 times faster, when compared to disk based paging. The Anemone prototype reduces page-fault latencies by a factor of 19.6—from an average of 9.8 ms with disk based paging to 500 μs with Anemone. Most importantly, Anemone provides a virtualized low-latency access to potenti…

Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.