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RAMCloud is also interesting from a research standpoint. Its two most important attributes are latency and scale. The first goal is to provide the lowest possible end-to-end latency for applications accessing the system from within the same datacenter. We currently achieve latencies of around 5μs for reads and 15μs for writes, but hope to improve these in the future. In addition, the system must scale, since no single machine can store enough DRAM to meet the needs of large-scale applications. We have designed RAMCloud to support at least 10,000 storage servers; the system must automatically manage all the information across the servers, so that clients do not need to deal with any distributed systems issues. The combination of latency and scale has created a large number of interesting research issues, such as how to ensure data durability without sacrificing the latency of reads and writes, how to take advantage of the scale of the system to recover very quickly after crashes, how to manage storage in DRAM, and how to provide higher-level features such as secondary indexes and multiple-object transactions without sacrificing the latency or scalability of the system. Our solutions to these problems are described in a series of technical papers.
The RAMCloud project is was based in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University. The project is no longer active and the students working on RAMCloud have graduated, so we cannot provide support for anyone wishing to use RAMCloud.
Learning About RAMCloud
General information about RAMCloud, such as talks and papers. Much of the information here is related to the research aspects of the project, as opposed to information on how to use RAMCloud.
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