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Re:Even a laptop can run RAM externally thanks to a little-k... by cmrdporcupine on Thursday October 19, 2023 @12:57PM (#37945389)
The article seems to reference having external AI etc accelerators colocated with the RAM they use, but then tied to a host machine via CXL. So that makes a certain amount of sense. Latency sensitive stuff happens co-located with the RAM, and then you just take advantage of throughput back to the host.

I'm personally now imagining a specialized database appliance which takes the role of the whole of the pager and buffer pool management from a DB (or KV store or whatever); a physical box which ties secondary storage arrays + large quantities of RAM + buffer pool mgmt firmware together on a box, then connect to host system via CXL. Host system does query planning end execution and everything else...

Is anybody doing this? Does anybody want to found a startup with me to do this? <sips more and more coffee...>

Re:Even a laptop can run RAM externally thanks to a little-k... by pbalcer on Thursday October 19, 2023 @01:07PM (#37945536)
There are enterprise database offerings that do something like that with RDMA. I'm almost certain CXL is being looked at for improvements.
Re:Even a laptop can run RAM externally thanks to a little-k... by nikriek on Thursday October 19, 2023 @04:28PM (#37948289)
I just finished my master’s thesis on database buffer management with CXL [1]. It’s not published due confidential hardware information, but we are working on a paper.

[1] https://hpi.de/rabl/teaching/master-theses/ongoing-masters-t...

Re:Even a laptop can run RAM externally thanks to a little-k... by cmrdporcupine on Thursday October 19, 2023 @07:13PM (#37950066)
Very cool. I look forward to the paper!

For some reason the whole issue of buffer mgmt is something I nerd out on a bit.