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

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.