Reviews for FaRM (NSDI'14)

1) Is the problem real?
Since DRAM is becoming cheaper and larger, now we can load small data set directly into Memory in order to reduce the overhead of disk/flash IO. However, by doing so, the network is still a bottleneck.  The problem is real.

2) What is the solution’s main idea (nugget)?
The authors try to modify and use RDMA to improve the performance (e.g. latency, throughput) of memory systems that using TCP/IP.

Two key mechanisms to improve performance: lock-free read over RDMA,  locality optimizations that enable single machine transactions

3) Why is solution different from previous work?
Previous work that also leveraging RDMA, they do not support one-sided read or efficient lock-free RDMA read, whereas FaRM can support that.

In addition,  FaRM’s technique to detect inconsistent reads is more general. It provides serializability with respect to general transactions.

4) Does the paper (or do you) identify any fundamental/hard trade-offs? 


While FaRM provides performance benefits of user-level networking to parallel applications, it is very hard to apply the model to a broader class of client-server applications. 

In addition, RDMA is point-to-point. Each participant receives an authenticator providing it permission to remotely read/write a particular region of memory. Since clients in client-server computing are not mutually trusted, the hardware would need to keep a separate region of memory for each active connection. 

5) Do you think the paper will be influential in 10 years? Why or why not?

I do not think so. It is because FaRM is just to incorporate RDMA into memory system. Even though there are some modification and refinement over RDMA, I think the whole paper's novelty and contribution is not that significant.