Clio: A Hardware-Software Co-Designed Disaggregated Memory System

Memory disaggregation has attracted great attention recently because of its benefits in efficient memory utilization and ease of management. Research on memory disaggregation so far has taken a software approach, running disaggregated memory management software either at servers that act as disaggregated memory nodes or at servers on the client side. This paper proposes a hardware-based disaggregated memory device, Clio, that manages disaggregated memory at the device side with novel software-hardware co-designs. Clio includes a hardware-based virtual memory system, a customized network stack, and a framework for computation offloading. Clio achieves low median and tail latency, high throughput, excellent scalability, and low energy cost.