RAN - A RAM Area Network

Bill Allcock
Seminar

In the 1980’s, Sun Microsystems ran a series of advertisements, with the tag line “The network is the computer.” A little premature at the time, but several trends (high bandwidth, low latency, reliable networks, deepening memory hierarchies, etc.) are making this feasible for some use cases today. As part of the RAN project, we have been working with a local startup called Kove, which produces RAM drives, to make RAM a schedulable resource. Like a SAN, we want to move a portion of the RAM off the individual nodes into a pool so that it can be scheduled and better utilized. In this presentation, I will describe the testbed we have in place, current status of and future plans for the software, and discuss some possible use cases.