Apta: Fault-tolerant object-granular CXL disaggregated memory for accelerating FaaS

Adarsh Patil, Vijay Nagarajan, Nikos Nikoleris, Nicolai Oswald

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract / Description of output

As cloud workloads increasingly adopt the faulttolerant Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) model, demand for improved performance has increased. Alas, the performance of FaaS applications is heavily bottlenecked by the remote object store in which FaaS objects are maintained. We identify that the upcoming CXL-based cache-coherent disaggregated memory is a promising technology for maintaining FaaS objects. Our analysis indicates that CXL’s low-latency, high-bandwidth access characteristics coupled with compute-side caching of objects, provides significant performance potential over an in-memory RDMA-based object store. We observe however that CXL lacks the requisite level of faulttolerance necessary to operate at an inter-server scale within the datacenter. Furthermore, its cache-line granular accesses impose inefficiencies for object-granular data store accesses. We propose Apta, a CXL-based object-granular memory ¯ interface for maintaining FaaS objects. Apta’s key innovation is ¯ a novel fault-tolerant coherence protocol for keeping the cached objects consistent without compromising availability in the face of compute server failures. Our evaluation of Apta using 6 full ¯ FaaS application workflows (totaling 26 functions) indicates that it outperforms a state-of-the-art fault-tolerant object caching protocol on an RDMA-based system by 21–90% and an uncached CXL-based system by 15-42%.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2023 53rd Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN 2023)
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Pages201-215
Number of pages15
ISBN (Electronic)9798350347937
ISBN (Print)9798350347944
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 9 Aug 2023
Event2023 53rd Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN) - Porto, Portugal
Duration: 27 Jun 202330 Jun 2023
Conference number: 53
https://dsn2023.dei.uc.pt/

Publication series

NameIEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN)
PublisherIEEE
ISSN (Print)1530-0889
ISSN (Electronic)2158-3927

Conference

Conference2023 53rd Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN)
Country/TerritoryPortugal
CityPorto
Period27/06/2330/06/23
Internet address

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