Pointers in Far Memory: A rethink of how data and computations should be organized

Appeared in ACM Queue 21(3).

Abstract

Effectively exploiting emerging far-memory technology requires consideration of operating on richly connected data outside the context of the parent process. Operating-system technology in development offers help by exposing abstractions such as memory objects and globally invariant pointers that can be traversed by devices and newly instantiated compute. Such ideas will allow applications running on future heterogeneous distributed systems with disaggregated memory nodes to exploit near-memory processing for higher performance and to independently scale their memory and compute resources for lower cost.

Publication date:
June 2023

Authors:
Ethan L. Miller
Achilles Benetopoulos
George Neville-Neil
Pankaj Mehra
Daniel Bittman

Projects:
Operating Systems Support for NVM

Available media

Full paper text: PDF
Presentation: slides

Bibtex entry

@article{miller-queue23,
  author       = {Ethan L. Miller and Achilles Benetopoulos and George Neville-Neil and Pankaj Mehra and Daniel Bittman},
  title        = {Pointers in Far Memory: A rethink of how data and computations should be organized},
  journal      = {ACM Queue},
  pages        = {75-93},
  volume       = {21},
  number       = {3},
  month        = jun,
  year         = {2023},
}