USENIX ATC '24 and OSDI '24

Sugi Lee and Mingyu Choi, Acryl Inc.; Ikjun Yeom, Acryl Inc. and Sungkyunkwan University; Younghoon Kim, Sungkyunkwan University

Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) provides high throughput, low latency, and minimal CPU usage for data-intensive applications. However, RDMA was initially designed for single-tenant use, and its application in a multi-tenant cloud environment poses challenges in terms of performance isolation, security, and scalability. This paper proposes a Preemption-enabled RDMA Framework (PeRF), which offers software-based performance isolation for efficient multi-tenancy in RDMA. PeRF leverages a novel RNIC preemption mechanism to dynamically control RDMA resource utilization for each tenant, while ensuring that RNICs remain busy, thereby enabling work conservation. PeRF outperforms existing approaches by achieving flexible performance isolation without compromising RDMA's bare-metal performance.

https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc24/presentation/lee