Low-Latency Communication for Fast DBMS Using RDMA and Shared Memory
Philipp Fent, Alexander van Renen, Andreas Kipf, Viktor Leis, Thomas Neumann, Alfons Kemper
Abstract
While hardware and software improvements greatly accelerated modern database systems' internal operations, the decades-old stream-based Socket API for external communication is still unchanged. We show experimentally, that for modern high-performance systems networking has become a performance bottleneck. Therefore, we argue that the communication stack needs to be redesigned to fully exploit modern hardware - as has already happened to most other database system components.We propose L5, a high-performance communication layer for database systems. L5 rethinks the flow of data in and out of the database system and is based on direct memory access techniques for intra-datacenter (RDMA) and intra-machine communication (Shared Memory). With L5, we provide a building block to accelerate ODBC-like interfaces with a unified and message-based communication framework. Our results show that using interconnects like RDMA (InfiniBand), RoCE (Ethernet), and Shared Memory (IPC), L5 can largely eliminate the network bottleneck for database systems.