Clever RDMA Technique Delivers Distributed Memory Pooling
As Greg points out this has come up multiple times and in multiple strategies for implementation.<p>In the early 2000&#x27;s I lead the design of a memory based Ethernet appliance which we called &quot;Network Accessible Memory&quot;. The basic idea combined the  fact that FPGAs were pretty cheap, you could easily build a gigabit network interface on one side and a DDR2&#x2F;3 interface on the other, and with a very simple ethernet protocol have terabytes of memory basically a couple of microseconds away from a CPU as opposed to &#x27;swap&#x27; which was milliseconds away at best. (we also simulated the architecture using a machine just exporting memory to the network)<p>The two biggest wins are that the memory is already &#x27;live&#x27; when machines that might use it boot up so they don&#x27;t spend time reading in state, and in a multi-processor storage subsystem you can put the buffer cache into memory without tying up any individual processor&#x27;s main memory which gives you faster throughput and lower latency as you&#x27;re not turning around the disk interfaces for meta data reads and mixed r&#x2F;w workloads don&#x27;t blow up your buffer cache.<p>All very cool. But all very &quot;specialized&quot; too.