Network Requirements for Resource Disaggregation

Problem

• Disaggregated datacenter (DDC) makes it easier for each resource technology to evolve independently, reduces the time-to-adoption, and enables fine-grained and efficient provisioning and scheduling of individual resources aross jobs.

• A key enabling (or blocking) factor for disaggregation is the network, as disaggregating CPU from memory and disk requires inter-resource communication to traverse the network fabric. However there has been little systematic evaluation of the network requirements for disaggregation.

Main Idea

• This paper takes the first stab at evaluating the minimum (bandwidth and latency) requirements that the network in disaggregated datacenters must provide.