This Wiki space is being page was used during the Spring Quarter of 2009 to collect design ideas for RAMCloud, a new kind of long-term storage based entirely in the main memories of a collection of commodity server machines.
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- Designed primarily for usage within a datacenter: there will be a collection of hundreds or thousands of dedicated RAMCloud server machines, which provide storage for hundreds or thousands of application machines running Web front-ends or other applications.
- Supports 10000 or more RAMCloud servers.
- Servers are commodity rack-mounted machines with as much memory as is cost effective (32-64 GB today?)
- All information is stored at all times in main memory: disk accesses are not in the critical path for either reading or writing data.
- Low latency access from other machines in the same datacenter: 5-10 microseconds total round-trip for small requests.
- High throughput: 1 million requests/second for small requests, using servers with modest numbers of cores (4-8?).
- Data durability equal to the best disk-based systems.
Goals for
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The Quarter
- Explore the design space around RAMClouds
- Err on the side of inclusivity of ideas and approaches rather than exclusivity: we don't have to make any actual design decisions this quarter, but we'd like to understand the consequences of a range of alternatives
- Collect our ideas on this Wiki
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