Meta is saving millions of dollars thanks to this clever memory hack

Date:
Thu, 23 Jun 2022 21:00:32 +0000

Description:
Transparent memory offloading (TMO) saves up to almost a third of memory per server.

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Engineers at Meta , Facebooks parent company, have revealed how they have been able to offer free memory using a software solution called Transparent Memory Offloading (TMO).

It is now part of the Linux kernel and, in a nutshell, automatically offloads data to other storage tiers (e.g. Samsungs CX memory expander) that are less costly and more power efficient than memory.

The savings are significant; TMO has been running on millions of Facebook servers for more than a year, saving up to almost a third of memory per server. While that is likely to be insignificant across dozens or even hundreds of servers, Facebook s immense scale presents a unique challenge. Analysis: Facebook's gargantuan appetite for RAM

The worlds largest social network has nearly three billion monthly active users and millions of servers spread around 21 locations worldwide. Should each server carry 128GB of RAM on average, that would amount to 256 million
GB (or 256PB) of RAM which, at an average cost of $4 per GB (DDR4 ECC RAM),
is about $1 billion worth of memory. Thats on the assumption that Facebook
has at least two million servers (Facebooks blog quoted millions of servers
as early as July 2018), with the real number likely to be far higher.

Numbers presented by the team that worked on TMO showed that the cost of memory accounts for a third of Metas server bill of materials, with
compressed RAM and SSD accounting for less than 11%. More worryingly, the
cost burden of RAM (as a percentage of the total infrastructure) has more
than doubled since Facebook launched its first generation of servers (it's currently on the fourth).

Adopting TMO does come with some drawbacks; most notably, a degradation in performance. But the gains in terms of power and memory savings, far, far outweigh the disadvantages and future iterations combined with hardware improvements (e.g. faster SSD or CXL drives) will offer further mitigation.



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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/news/meta-is-saving-millions-of-dollars-thanks-to-th is-clever-memory-hack/


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