Aggregating and managing memory across computing nodes in cloud environments

Abstract

Managing memory capacity in cloud environments is a challenging problem, mainly due to the variability in virtual machine (VM) memory demand that sometimes can’t be met by the memory of one node. New architectures have introduced hardware support for a shared global address space that, together with fast interconnects, enables resource sharing among multiple nodes. Thus, more memory is globally available to a computing node avoiding the costly swaps or migrations. This paper presents a solution to aggregate the memory capacity of multiple nodes in a virtualized cloud computing infrastructure. It is based on the Transcendent Memory (Tmem) abstraction and uses a user-space process to manage the memory available to a node, and distribute the aggregated memory across the computing infrastructure. We evaluate our solution using CloudSuite 3.0 benchmarks on Linux and Xen.