Performance Evaluation of a Remote Block Device with High-Speed Cluster Interconnects

Today's data intensive applications require to process large amount of data on cluster systems that consist of commodity computing nodes with high performance network interconnects. Individual computing nodes in the cluster system have indentical resource specification although applications vary greatly in their resource needs. From imbalance of the amount of memory used different computing nodes, we can consider the use of remote idle memory to alleviate the memory pressure on individual computing nodes. We propose a remote memory block device (RMBD) using remote memory access capabilities provided by both Infiniband and RoCE as one of remote swapping techniques. We evaluates the I/O performance of RMBD with it of the block device using TCP/IP protocols. From performance experiments, we find that RMBD using RDMA is able to improve througput by up to 20 times in read operation and 6 times in write operation compared to it using TCP/IP. We demonstrate that RMBD as swap device can provide performance benefits that is up to 2 times speed up compared to HDD for quick-sorting.