# Effectively Prefetching Remote Memory with Leap

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.09829 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09829/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 22 Nov 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Treehouse: A Case For Carbon-Aware Datacenter Software](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02120/) (2022)
- [DeePref: Deep Reinforcement Learning For Video Prefetching In Content Delivery Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07881/) (2023)
- [Learning Semantics, Not Addresses: Runtime Neural Prefetching for Far Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00384/) (2025)
- [OpenURMA: A Clean-Room Open Implementation of the Unified Bus Protocol](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28717/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Memory disaggregation over RDMA can improve the performance of memory-constrained applications by replacing disk swapping with remote memory accesses. However, state-of-the-art memory disaggregation solutions still use data path components designed for slow disks. As a result, applications experience remote memory access latency significantly higher than that of the underlying low-latency network, which itself is too high for many applications. In this paper, we propose Leap, a prefetching solution for remote memory accesses due to memory disaggregation. At its core, Leap employs an online, majority-based prefetching algorithm, which increases the page cache hit rate. We complement it with a lightweight and efficient data path in the kernel that isolates each application's data path to the disaggregated memory and mitigates latency bottlenecks arising from legacy throughput-optimizing operations. Integration of Leap in the Linux kernel improves the median and tail remote page access latencies of memory-bound applications by up to 104.04x and 22.62x, respectively, over the default data path. This leads to up to 10.16x performance improvements for applications using disaggregated memory in comparison to the state-of-the-art solutions.