Modern interconnects like InfiniBand and 10 Gigabit Ethernet haveintroduced a range of novel features while delivering excellent
performance. Due to their high performance to cost ratios, increasing
number of datacenters are being deployed in clusters and
cluster-of-cluster scenarios connected with these modern
interconnects. However, the extent to which the current deployments
manage to benefit from these interconnects is often far below the
achievable levels.
In order to extract the possible benefits that the capabilities of
modern interconnects can deliver, selective redesigning of performance
critical components needs to be done. Such redesigning needs to take
the characteristics of datacenter applications into account. Further,
performance critical operations common to multiple datacenter
applications like caching, resource management, etc. need to be
identified and redesigned utilizing the features of modern
interconnects. These operations can be designed and implemented as
system services such that they can be provided in a consolidated
platform for all other datacenter applications and services to
utilize.
In this thesis we explore various techniques to leverage the advanced
features of modern interconnects to design these distributed system
services. We identify a set of services with high performance
requirements that have wide utility in datacenters scenarios. In
particular, we identify distributed lock management, global memory
aggregation and large scale data-transfers as performance critical
operations that need to be carefully redesigned in order to maximize
the benefits using of modern interconnects. We further explore the use
of these primitive operations and RDMA capabilities of modern
interconnects to design highly efficient caching schemes which are
critical to most datacenters. We present these components in a
layered framework such that applications can leverage the benefits of
these services through pre-defined interfaces. We present detailed
experimental results demonstrating the benefits of our approaches.