Memory Pooling with CXL

Abstract

Compute Express Link (CXL) has recently attracted great attention thanks to its excellent hardware heterogeneity management and resource disaggregation capabilities. Even though there is yet no commercially available product or platform integrating CXL into memory pooling, it is expected to make memory resources practically and efficiently disaggregated much better than ever before. In this article, we propose directly accessible memory disaggregation, DirectCXL that straight connects a host processor complex and remote memory resources over CXL’s memory protocol (CXL.mem). Our empirical evaluation shows that DirectCXL exhibits around 7× better performance than remote direct memory access (RDMA)-based memory pooling for diverse real-world workloads.