Co-DIMM: Inter-Socket Data Sharing via a Common DIMM Channel

Paper i proceeding, 2016

To improve computing density, modern datacenters widely deploy server chassis with several processor sockets integrated as independent nodes. Distributed applications processing enormous datasets on such systems require frequent inter-node communication. Data sharing among distributed on-board socket nodes in the same server chassis via commodity networking and inter-socket connection technologies is inefficient, though. To address this problem, we propose inter-socket data sharing via normal memory access instructions. Co-DIMM eliminates the overheads of protocol-stack processing and data movement through the network. Instead of sharing data through centralized shared memory based on NUMA inter-socket connections, DDR switches allow Co-DIMM ownership to be changed dynamically to support asynchronous producer-consumer data sharing. We implement Co-DIMM in a custom in-house FPGA-based platform to generate preliminary results showing that data-sharing latency between two sockets is as low as 1.33 mu s. We present potential Co-DIMM usage scenarios and discuss implementation challenges.