CAREER: Distributed Protocols and Primitives Optimized for RDMA Read/Write Operations in Data Management Systems

互联网的普及使人们能够每天向数百万用户提供广泛使用的服务。设计支持这些服务的系统软件的最大挑战之一是设计软件基础设施的组件，以进行扩展以处理极大的工作负载。远程直接内存访问(RDMA)是提高可伸缩性的重要技术。RDMA允许服务器在不中断其执行的情况下访问远程服务器内存，从而实现更高效的通信并能够服务于大量用户请求。这个项目研究的是同步。同步是可伸缩性的障碍，因为它需要大量的额外计算，以便在多个实体之间进行协调，但为了确保数据完整性，同步是强制性的。具体地说，同步通常需要双向通信，其中远程计算机响应数据访问请求。该方案研究了单边RDMA优化的高性能同步技术，并将演示如何在易于使用的抽象中实现这些技术，以开发基础设施系统软件。该项目的成果是允许专业和非专业程序员构建服务，利用RDMA处理数百万用户请求而不牺牲性能。通过利用此项目交付的基础设施软件，开发人员可以将他们的大部分工作集中在服务的核心业务逻辑上。该项目的原则和结果有助于实现双重目标。首先，它们构成了一个坚实的基础，可以指导渴望提供面向整个社会的服务的未来几代开发人员。其次，它们抽象了具有挑战性的细节，允许程序员利用项目的解决方案，而不考虑他们在RDMA和同步领域的技术深度。这不仅简化了大型高性能服务的实施，还平衡了有资源解决复杂问题的人和没有资源的人之间的竞争环境。这些研究成果将通过一个广泛的教育计划在研究生和本科课程以及K-12活动的教材和工具中正式确定，该计划旨在鼓励学生学习计算机科学，为研究生学习提供一条途径，并扩大对计算机科学的参与和增加计算机科学的多样性，特别是对女性。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The proliferation of the Internet enables the delivery of widely used services to millions of users every day. One of the biggest challenges in designing the system software that supports these services is engineering the components of the software infrastructure to scale to handle extremely large workloads. Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) is an important technology to improve achievable scalability. RDMA allows servers to access remote server memory without interrupting their execution resulting on more efficient communication and the ability to serve massive numbers of user requests. This project studies synchronization. Synchronization is a barrier to scalability as it entails significant additional computation in order to coordinate among multiple entities but is mandatory to ensure data integrity. In particular, synchronization typically requires two-sided communication where the remote machine responds to data access requests. This proposal investigates one-sided RDMA-optimized high-performance synchronization techniques and will demonstrate how they can be realized in easy-to-use abstractions to develop infrastructural system software.The outcomes of this project are techniques that allow both specialized and non-expert programmers to build services that can exploit RDMA to handle millions of user requests without sacrificing performance. By leveraging the infrastructural software delivered as a result of this project, developers can focus most of their work on the core business logic of the service. The principles and findings of the project contribute to a twofold goal. First, they form a solid foundation to instruct future generations of developers who yearn for delivering services that target society at large. Second, they abstract away the challenging details, allowing programmers to leverage the project's solutions regardless of their technical depth in the realm of RDMA and synchronization. This not only simplifies the implementation of large high-performance services, but also evens the playing field between those who have the resources to tackle complex problems, and those who do not. These research outcomes will be formalized in teaching material and tools for graduate and undergraduate courses and K-12 activities through a broad education plan designed to encourage students towards computer science study with a path towards graduate study and to broaden participation and increase diversity in computer science, especially for women.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.