Pangaea v2 : CXL-Based Disaggregated Memory System Architecture for Cloud-Native Orchestration

Today’s data centers suffer from CPU and memory resource stranding because they often over-provision resources when deploying servers for worst-case scenarios. This problem gives rise to a disaggregated system architecture allowing each type of resource to be allocated, utilized and freed separately as required. In particular, research on disaggregated memory systems over the past few years has focused primarily on achieving low remote memory access latency over Ethernet, which is known as the RDMA optimization approach.

In this paper, we introduce a dynamic rack-scale disaggregated memory system architecture, so called Pangaea v2 using ASIC-CXL H/W and memory orchestration S/W designed to increase the memory utilization of worker nodes between containerized applications execution in a Kubernetes, a major process container platform in the data center. In our evaluation with in-memory database application, disaggregated CXL memory system shows significantly better throughput improved by up to 10.2x/6.7x and 99th tail latency reduced to 96%/93% compared to RDMA with RoCEv2/InfiniBand.