Advancing Cloud with Memory Disaggregation

Here at IBM Research - Ireland, we are rethinking the very foundations on which the cloud is built . Our concept is to break the physical boundaries of data centre servers by disaggregating CPUs and memory into separate physical entities. This transforms the aggregated data centre memory to a single resource pool from which any CPU can draw resources. As requests arrive, the system can connect cores to memory on the fly, building platforms that match exactly the requirements. The advantages of memory disaggregation are manifold. First of all, with the same amount of resources we can serve many more requests. Secondly, memory-centric applications can now use all the memory available in the data centre, instead of being confined to the memory of a single server. Finally, memory and CPU can now be upgraded independently bringing more agility and modularity to the cloud service provider. We are working under an EU funded project, dReDBox. The project is led by IBM Research Ireland, together with 10 industrial and academic partners across the European Union. The dReDBox project is funded under agreement No. 687632 by the EC H2020 programme aspires to innovate the way we build data centres today, shifting to employing pooled, disaggregated – instead of monolithic, tightly integrated – components. By doing so, the dReDBox proposition has the ambition to lead to significantly improved levels of utilization, scalability, reliability and power efficiency, both in conventional cloud and edge data centres.