MemVerge and sk Hynix: Project Endless Memory

Gregory Price, Senior Software Engineer at MemVerge, presents an overview of Project Endless Memory, a system co-engineered by MemVerge and sk Hynix.

Big data applications are limited in scale by the memory capacity available on a single node. Expanding the single-node memory is costly and not possible beyond a limit, consequently, a scale-out approach with multiple nodes in a cluster is commonly used. In the scale-out approach, large amounts of data are sent across nodes over the network, which introduces several problems -
• Additional latency and contending for network bandwidth.
• Multiple copies of the same data, increasing the overall memory usage.
• Data skew - Unbalanced data partition causing memory usage to spike on a node, memory threshing, or even OOM killer.

Project Endless Memory addresses this problem by combining an Elastic Memory Service software from MemVerge and a Niagara Pooled Memory System from SK Hynix to allow hosts to dynamically allocate memory as needed, mitigating OOM errors and improving application performance.

Endless Memory represents an industry milestone because it features CXL memory pooling and tiering technologies running on real CXL memory pooling hardware from SK Hynix. The innovative solution incorporates technology that transforms the way data-intensive applications are managed and will provide a more seamless and efficient way to manage memory in clustered environments.