Make It Real: An End-to-End Implementation of A Physically Disaggregated Data Center

Abstract

Resource disaggregation is an approach to separate different hardware resources into independent pools in a data center, so that these pools can be easily managed and their resources can be allocated in a tight but unbounded way. The past decade has seen research and practices in realizing the resource-disaggregation idea on regular servers. We advocate for a physically disaggregated data center, where disaggregated resource pools consist of hardware devices, not servers. Physical disaggregation could unlock another level of benefits in resource disaggregation, including further improved cost saving, easier maintenance and scaling, and more customization. This paper presents our efforts in building an end-to-end physically disaggregated data center, including the design and implementation of disaggregated hardware devices, networking systems for connecting these devices, operating systems for orchestrating them, and porting of traditional and cloud-computing applications to this physically disaggregated platform.