RDMA Communciation Patterns: A Systematic Evaluation

Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) is a networking protocol that provides high bandwidth and low latency accesses to a remote node’s main memory. Although there has been much work around RDMA, such as building libraries on top of RDMA or even applications leveraging RDMA, it remains a hard problem to identify the most suitable RDMA primitives and their combination for a given problem. While there have been some initial studies included in papers that aim to investigate selected performance characteristics of particular design choices, there has not been a systematic study to evaluate the communication patterns of scale-out systems. In this paper, we address this issue by systematically investigating how to efficiently use RDMA for building scale-out systems.