Authors: Alexander Merritt, Ada Gavrilovska (Georgia Tech); Yuan Chen, and Dejan Milojicic (Hewlett Packard Labs)

Nibble is a scalable, memory-capacity efficient key-value store for very large scale machines (e.g., tens of terabytes or more memory and hundreds of CPU cores). Nibble promotes the use of a concurrent multi-head log-structured memory to attain high performance and resistance to memory fragmentation, together with scalable low-latency synchronization and optimistically concurrent indexing that allow application threads to scale to hundreds of cores. A prototype for single node system has been implemented, and its effectiveness has been evaluated on a HPE SuperDomeX machine with 240 cores and 12 TiB of DRAM across a wide range of workload patterns.

This work will appear in the Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, Vol. 11, No. 4 [PDF].

This project was additionally supported by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, with alternative locations of the source code found at the below URLs. Due to legal reaons, the project was given an alternative codename.

• HPE Internal: https://github.hpe.com/labs/shoveller
• External: https://github.com/HewlettPackard/shoveller

Research prototype.

Nibble is implemented entirely in the Rust language and requires the ``nightly'' branch of the compiler. Installation can be done without root administration from rustup.rs.

https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/install.html

curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh 

source ~/.cargo/env

rustup default nightly

rustup default nightly’ command may take quite a while due to rust-docs installation known issue: rust-lang/rustup#763.

Verify the installation.

% rustc --version

You should see something like

rustc 1.17.0-nightly (e1cec5d4b 2017-03-29)

The first time build will take a while to update the registry. Just be patient.

cd src
cargo update
cargo build --lib --release

You will need a machine with at least 32GB memory to test Nibble.

You must reserve sufficient amount of 2MB pages:

echo N > /sys/kernel/mm/hugepages/hugepages-2048kB/nr_hugepages

--- A Simple Example: create, read and delete an object ---

source code: src/bin/example.rs

Step 1. Reserve sufficient amountof 2MB hugpages

sudo su -c 'echo 30000 > /sys/kernel/mm/hugepages/hugepages-2048kB/nr_hugepages' 

Step 2. Compile and run the test example

cargo run --bin example --release

Environment variable NIBDEBUG configures debug messages. You can set NIBDEBUG=(1-5) to display more or fewer debug messages.

Nibble's main API acts like a key-value store (KVS). It currently runs as a library within a single process address space, and supports concurrent access from many threads. Nibble requires objects to be associated with ``keys'' which are fixed at 8 bytes (2^64 values). Objects can be any size up to the size of Nibble's internal segment length (default is 32 MiB). Keys exist within a single namespace.

One creates an instance of Nibble and invokes methods directly on that object instance:

let capacity = 1_usize << 38;
let mut kvs = LSM::new(capacity);

All public methods return a Status object, which is an alias of type std::result::Result. To create or update an existing object, use put_object:

// function signature
fn put_object(obj: &ObjDesc) -> Status

let key: u64 = 1;
let v: Vec<u64> = vec![1_u64,2,3,4,5];
let p = Pointer(value.as_ptr() as *const u8);
let obj = ObjDesc::new(key, p, v.len()*8);
assert!(kvs.put_object(&obj).is_ok());

ObjDesc is a metatype that simplifies the argument list:

struct ObjDesc {
    key: u64,
    value: *const u8,
    vlen: u64,
}

To read an object from the store use the following:

// function signature
fn get_object(key: u64, buf: &mut [u8]) -> Status

let key: u64 = 1;
let mut buf: Vec<u64> = Vec::with_capacity(8);
assert!(kvs.get_object(key, &mut buf).is_ok());
// Use 'buf' as desired

It will write the object to the provided input parameter buffer, which is allocated by the caller.

To remove an object from the store, or check if it exists:

// function signatures
fn del_object(key: u64) -> Status
fn exists(key: u64) -> Status

let key: u64 = 1;
assert!(kvs.del_object(key).is_ok());
assert!(kvs.exists(key).is_err());

Compaction is enabled manually by invoking the appropriate methods (below). By default, eight threads are spawned on each processor socket to provide compaction for the local memory. They will only engage once 20% of remaining space is free. Worker threads are pinned to one specific socket, and only compact the memory for that socket.

for node in 0..numa::NODE_MAP.sockets() {
    kvs.enable_compaction(NodeId(node));
}

• Networked environments.
• Persistent data (e.g., NVM, or disk). Topic of future work.

echo 16384 > /sys/kernel/mm/hugepages/hugepages-2048kB/nr_hugepages

Debugging messages are supported via environment variables:

# N is a value in the inclusive range [0,5]
NIB_DEBUG=N cargo run --bin ycsb --release

Binaries are written to target/release/ or target/debug/. Omitting --release on build will generate the latter, and enable easy debugging with GDB. There are many tunable parameters found at the top of many source files.

• HPE integrity SuperdomeX. https://www.hpe.com/ us/en/servers/superdome.html, January 2016.