Tigon - A Distributed Database for a CXL Pod

Learn about Tigon, a groundbreaking distributed in-memory database system presented at OSDI '25 that revolutionizes cross-host data synchronization by leveraging CXL (Compute Express Link) memory instead of traditional network-based approaches. Discover how researchers from The University of Texas at Austin and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign developed the first distributed database to use atomic operations on CXL memory for synchronizing concurrent data accesses across hosts, achieving significant performance improvements over existing solutions. Explore the technical challenges addressed in this 19-minute conference presentation, including CXL memory's higher latency and lower bandwidth compared to local DRAM, as well as limited hardware support for cross-host cache coherence. Understand the architectural innovations that enable Tigon to deliver up to 2.5× higher throughput compared to optimized shared-nothing databases using CXL memory as transport and up to 18.5× higher throughput compared to RDMA-based distributed databases, as demonstrated through TPC-C and YCSB benchmark evaluations. Gain insights into how this research advances the field of distributed transactional databases by moving beyond decades of network-based synchronization approaches toward more efficient memory-centric solutions.