On 9th Nov, the third Student Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) Programming Competition unveiled its winning list, 7 out of 51 teams won the final contest. USTC team and team from National University of Defense Technology won The First Price.
USTC team was supervised by Prof. AN Hong, consisting of sophomore ZHUANG Shiyuan, two juniors LUO Xiao, GUO Xing, and two graduates XU Qizhe and YAO Wenjun. Team spend the whole summer vacation reading through the source code of Memcached, applied techniques of RDMA to accelerate its execution by nearly 20 time faster. A detailed technique report was submitted to the committee, in which they compared the performance before and after the embedment and explained the reasons underlying the improvement.
RDMA is a key technology for many kinds of network-based software. Conventional TCP/IP technique is inefficient and demands considerable resources in the data transmission. RDMA allows exchanging data between the memory and storage devices in the remote hosts directly, without intervention of any other computers, caches or operation systems. Thus, it reduces the burden on the bandwidth and other computer resource, especially on the involved operation systems.
In this competition, it is demanded to accelerate systematic software that provides high-performance objective caching service in the distributed memories– Memcached. This software reduces accessing database by caching data and objectives in the main memory. Thereby, it could be much beneficial in increasing the speed of dynamic Web applications and their scalability.
(LI Yang, School of Computer Science and Technology)
