memwalkd: Accelerating Key-value stores using Page Table Walkers

Anupindi, RS and Kotni, S and Basu, A (2022) memwalkd: Accelerating Key-value stores using Page Table Walkers. In: 29th Annual IEEE International Conference on High Performance Computing, Data, and Analytics, HiPC 2022, 18-21 December 2022, Bangalore, pp. 69-74.

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Abstract

In-memory key-value stores (KVS) or caches form the backbone of many commercial and HPC applications. The basic operation of KVS revolves around storing or updating the mapping from keys to their corresponding values and looking up that mapping when requested by a client. We observe that the memory management unit (MMU) in modern processors does something similar - it looks up the mapping between virtual addresses and physical addresses stored in the per-process page table. We leverage the MMU to gain hardware acceleration for key-value lookup for free in a new key-value store design called memwalkd. We hash keys to unique virtual addresses. These addresses map to the physical addresses that hold the corresponding values. Thus, GET/SETs are performed by simply issuing loads/stores to the hash of a key. Across a wide range of workloads, memwalkd achieves 1.8× better throughput over a highly-optimized implementation of memcached called MICA [1]

Item Type:	Conference Paper
Publication:	Proceedings - 2022 IEEE 29th International Conference on High Performance Computing, Data, and Analytics, HiPC 2022
Publisher:	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Additional Information:	The copyright for this article belongs to Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Keywords:	Mapping; Mica; Physical addresses, Basic operation; Hardware acceleration; Hardware memory management unit; Key values; Key-value stores; Memory keys; Modern processors; Page table; Page table walker; Virtual memory, Virtual addresses
Department/Centre:	Division of Electrical Sciences > Computer Science & Automation Others
Date Deposited:	14 Jun 2023 11:11
Last Modified:	14 Jun 2023 11:11
URI:	https://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/82013

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