Abstract

Cloud computing has been rapidly expanding in the last decade, and has become one of the most heavily researched topics in computing; yet despite significant hardware developments, server architecture maintains a monolithic structure that limits the capabilities of cloud-based systems. Memory limitations force cloud providers to add more monolithic servers to their data centers every day, and demanding software systems may require specially designed servers. In this article, we identify enabling technologies for physical memory pools such as OS design, distributed shared memory structures and virtualization with regards to their relevance and impact on eliminating memory limits, and we discuss the challenges for physical memory pools which can be used by multiple servers.