RDMA-powered proxy communication

Details

Supervisors

Riviere, Etienne ; Rosinosky, Guillaume

Faculty

Ecole polytechnique de Louvain

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences informatiques, à finalité spécialisée

Abstract

In data centers, advanced networking technologies such as remote direct memory access (RDMA) have emerged to cope with increasing requirements in low latency and high bandwidth for various types of applications (microservices, big data, deep learning). Tech giants such as Microsoft and Alibaba rely on them and invest in studying how to maximize their potential. The goal of this thesis is to allow unmodified applications to benefit from such technologies. To achieve this, we propose a middleware approach in which dedicated proxies abstract the specificities of communication mediums. In our approach, application components communicate via these proxies, allowing the integration of accelerated networking solutions into the proxies independently from the application. The assembly and management of these proxies constitute the service mesh architecture. We integrate our approach with Envoy, a widely-used proxy used in the Istio service mesh. We evaluated the performance of our solution, comparing it with the default TCP-based communication for memcached, a high-performance database cache layer used in many latency-sensitive applications. Our results demonstrate that our solution can significantly benefit latency-sensitive applications, providing a latency reduction of up to 20-25% for certain workloads.