RUMA has it

Abstract

Memory management is one of the most boring topics in database research. It plays a minor role in tasks like free-space management or efficient space usage. Here and there we also realize its impact on database performance when worrying about NUMA-aware memory allocation, data compacting, snapshotting, and defragmentation. But, overall, let's face it: the entire topic sounds as exciting as 'garbage collection' or 'debugging a program for memory leaks'. What if there were a technique that would promote memory management from a third class helper thingie to a first class citizen in algorithm and systems design? What if that technique turned the role of memory management in a database system (and any other data processing system) upside-down? What if that technique could be identified as a key for redesigning various core algorithms with the effect of outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods considerably? Then we would write this paper. We introduce RUMA: Rewired User-space Memory Access. It allows for physiological data management, i.e. we allow developers to freely rewire the mappings from virtual to physical memory (in user space) while at the same time exploiting the virtual memory support offered by hardware and operating system. We show that fundamental database building blocks such as array operations, partitioning, sorting, and snapshotting benefit strongly from RUMA.

Anisotropic behavior in the lithiation of a silicon nanopillar

“…In cases of SATA/IDE, the target system employs a hardware controller (i.e., disk controller) to manage their storage interface protocol, so the interface driver usually handles I/O interrupt or system memory management. In contrast, in the case of NVMe, a kernel module (NVMe driver) [11], [54], [55] Arrakis [14], [15], [16] Ishiguro et al [29] Aerie [17] RUMA [56] NVMeDirect [12] Moneta-D [20] Direct-FUSE [18] Strata [30] Breeze [57] Simurgh [25] XFUSE [58] SplitFS [21] HyCache [59] Quill [26] Son et al [60], [61] ZoFS [22] Davram [62] vNVML [27], [28] EvFS [19] Kuco [63] DLFS [64] URFS [65] UMFS [31] DevFS [23] CrossFS [24] FSP [32] directly accesses the PCIe bus over a memory mapped I/O and issues the request to the target SSD by composing an nvme_rw_command.…”

“…More productive equipment for developers. Inspired by FUSE, Schuhknecht et al [56] proposes a new approach named RUMA, which aims to manage physical memory allocation in user space. Considering that efficient and secure memory management is crucial for developing dataintensive systems, RUMA claims that traditional methods for memory allocation cannot achieve both flexibility and access performance.…”