ADPDM: Accelerating Distributed Pointer-Traversals on Disaggregated Memory

Caches at CPU nodes in disaggregated memory architectures amortize the high data access latency over the network. However, such caches are fundamentally unable to improve performance for workloads requiring pointer traversals across linked data structures. We argue for accelerating these pointer traversals closer to disaggregated memory, in a manner that preserves expressiveness for supporting various linked structures, ensures energy efficiency and performance, and supports distributed execution. We design ADPDM to meet all the above requirements for pointer-traversal workloads on rack-scale disaggregated memory through the principled use of FPGAbased SmartNICs and programmable network switches. Our evaluation of ADPDM shows that it enables low-latency, highthroughput, and energy-efficient execution for a wide range of common pointer traversal workloads on disaggregated memory that fare poorly with caching alone.