DiME: A Performance Emulator for Disaggregated Memory Architectures

Resource disaggregation is a new design paradigm for data center servers, where the compute, memory, storage, and I/O resources of servers are disaggregated and connected by a high-speed interconnect network. Resource disaggregation, and memory disaggregation in particular, can have significant impact on application performance, due to the increased latency in accessing a portion of the system's memory remotely. While applications need to be redesigned and optimized to work well on these new architectures, the unavailability of commodity disaggregated memory hardware makes it difficult to evaluate any such optimizations. To address this issue, our work develops DiME, an emulator for disaggregated memory systems. Our tool can emulate different access latencies over different parts of an application's memory image as specified by the user. We evaluate our tool extensively using popular datacenter workloads to demonstrate its efficacy and usefulness, and show that it outperforms previous emulators in its ability to emulate different access delays at a fine per-page granularity.