<div>Remote Direct Memory Access, or RDMA, is a technology that allows one computer server to direct access the memory of another server without involving its CPU. Compared with traditional network technologies, RDMA offers several benefits including low latency, high throughput, and low CPU utilization. These features are especially attractive to datacenters, and because of this, datacenters have started to adopt RDMA in production scale in recent years.</div><div>However, RDMA was designed for confined, single-tenant, High-Performance-Computing (HPC) environments. Many of its design choices do not fit datacenters well, and it cannot be readily used by datacenter applications. To use RDMA, current datacenter applications have to build customized software stacks and fine-tune their performance. In addition, RDMA offers limited scalability and does not have good support for resource sharing or protection across different applications.</div><div>This dissertation sets out to seek solutions that can solve issues of RDMA in a systematic way and makes it more suitable for a wide range of datacenter applications.</div><div>Our first task is to make RDMA more scalable, easier to use, and have better support for safe resource sharing in datacenters. For this purpose, we propose to add an indirection layer on top of native RDMA to virtualize its low-level abstraction into a high-level one. This indirection layer safely manages RDMA resources for different datacenter applications and also provide a means for better scalability.</div><div>After making RDMA more suitable for datacenter environments, our next task is to build applications that can exploit all the benefits from (our improved) RDMA. We designed a set of systems that store data in remote persistent memory and let client machines access these data through pure one-sided RDMA communication. These systems lower monetary and energy cost compared to traditional datacenter data stores (because no processor is needed at remote persistent memory), while achieving good performance and reliability.</div><div>Our final task focuses on a completely different and so far largely overlooked one — security implications of RDMA. We discovered several key vulnerabilities in the one-sided communication pattern and in RDMA hardware. We exploited one of them to create a novel set of remote side-channel attacks, which we are able to launch on a widely used RDMA system with real RDMA hardware.</div><div>This dissertation is one of the initial efforts in making RDMA more suitable for datacenter environments from scalability, usability, cost, and security aspects. We hope that the systems we built as well as the lessons we learned can be helpful to future networking and systems researchers and practitioners.</div>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:purdue.edu/oai:figshare.com:article/8986352 |
| Date | 16 October 2019 |
| Creators | Shin-yeh Tsai (7027667) |
| Source Sets | Purdue University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis |
| Rights | CC BY 4.0 |
| Relation | https://figshare.com/articles/BUILDING_FAST_SCALABLE_LOW-COST_AND_SAFE_RDMA_SYSTEMS_IN_DATACENTERS/8986352 |
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