Publication
Zero-sided RDMA: Network-driven Data Shuffling for Disaggregated Heterogeneous Cloud DBMSs
Matthias Jasny; Lasse Thostrup; Sajjad Tamimi; Andreas Koch; Zsolt István; Carsten Binnig
In: Proceedings of the ACM on Management of Data (PACMMOD), Vol. 2, No. 1, Pages 36:1-36:28, ACM Digital Library, 2024.
Abstract
In this paper, we present a novel communication scheme called zero-sided RDMA, enabling data exchange as
a native network service using a programmable switch. In contrast to one- or two-sided RDMA, in zero-sided
RDMA, neither the sender nor the receiver is actively involved in data exchange. Zero-sided RDMA thus
enables efficient RDMA-based data shuffling between heterogeneous hardware devices in a disaggregated
setup without the need to implement a complete RDMA stack on each heterogeneous device or the need for a
CPU that is co-located with the accelerator to coordinate the data transfer. As such, we think that zero-sided
RDMA is a major building block to make efficient use of heterogeneous accelerators in future cloud DBMSs.
In our evaluation, we show that zero-sided RDMA can outperform existing one-sided RDMA-based schemes
for accelerator-to-accelerator communication and thus speed up typical distributed database operations such
as joins.