MemNet: Enhancing throughput and energy efficiency for hybrid workloads via para-virtualized memory sharing

Virtualization has become a building block for modern IT industry, and many datacenters are now highly virtualized. It is known that virtualization also introduces nontrivial overhead, which can cause severe self-interference inside a VM when CPU intensive tasks and bandwidth intensive tasks are co-located. Energy efficiency of the server can be affected as well. While such overhead is well-studied in application/protocol specific context, a more comprehensive solution is yet to be explored for general cloud services. In this paper, we present MemNet, a novel protocol-independent solution that enables paravirtualized memory sharing between host and guest VMs. This design successfully decouples I/O and computation operations and lifts the offered interface from the physical devices to highlevel network services. Our real-world implementation on KVM indicates that, MemNet can achieve 27% and 70% gain in terms of computing and networking performance, respectively, by resolving the self-interference. It also provides 32% improvement in terms of energy efficiency.