HIGH PERFORMANCE AND SCALABLE SOFT SHARED STATE FOR NEXT-GENERATION DATACENTERS

In the past decade, with the increasing adoption of Internet as the primary means of electronic interaction and communication, web-based datacenters have become a central requirement for providing online services. Today, several applications and services have been deployed in such datacenters in a variety of environments including e-commerce, medical informatics, genomics, etc. Most of these applications and services share significant state information that are critical for the efficient functioning of the datacenter. However, existing mechanisms for sharing the state information are both inefficient in terms of performance and scalability, and non-resilient to loaded conditions in the datacenter. In addition, existing mechanisms do not take complete advantage of the features of emerging technologies which are gaining momentum in current datacenters. This dissertation presents an efficient soft state sharing substrate that leverages the features of emerging technologies such as high-speed networks, Intel’s I/OAT and multicore architectures to address the limitations mentioned above. Specifically, the dissertation targets three important aspects: (i) designing efficient state sharing components using the features of emerging technologies, (ii) understanding the interactions between the proposed components and (iii) analyzing the impact of the proposed components and their interactions with datacenter applications and services in terms of performance, scalability and resiliency. ii Our evaluations with the soft state sharing substrate not only show an order of magnitude performance improvement over traditional implementations but also demonstrate the resiliency to loaded conditions in the datacenter. Evaluations with several datacenter applications also suggest that the substrate is scalable and has a low-overhead. The proposed substrate is portable across multiple modern interconnects such as InfiniBand, iWARP-capable networks like 10-Gigabit Ethernet both in LAN and WAN environments. In addition, our designs provide advanced capabilities such as one-sided communication, asynchronous memory copy operations, etc., even on systems without high-speed networks and I/OAT. Thus, our proposed designs, optimizations and evaluations demonstrate that the substrate is quite promising in tackling the state sharing issues with current and next-generation datacenters.