NOTE: This post is a bit old because it was copied from elsewhere as-is. I’m consolidating platforms and moved this here.
SIGECOM is an "economics and computation" ACM SIG at UIUC. RAM-MM is a set of patches for Linux that treat RAM allocations as a set of evictable commodities contracts with relative prices/priorities. Everything it attempts to do can be classified either as an engineering goal or a social goal.
Engineering Goals
The docs and presentations I've written explain it well (but aren't recent), so I'll refer you to...
Here is an except from the Kconfig that summarizes it well.
The GitHub repo is internal to SIGECOM, but feel free to contact me if you want to contribute. It will remain internal until some set of programs can reasonably use these APIs to more efficiently allocate RAM (i.e. validating demand for such a platform).
Social Goals
RAM-MM also exists to be a platform that other people can independently contribute towards. This has a few advantages, such as:
Clear boundaries between programs already exist
Programs are already developed independently
Benchmarks to track system efficiency/progress over time are easy to make
Individual people can take ownership of their respective piece(s)
This is an attempt to align smaller contributions to something larger. You can also think of it like price discrimination of people's effort or cybersecurity capture-the-flags.
Today
The project is dormant mostly because of lack of interest/participation from others. The engineering goals are sound and worth pursuing, but the scope of this project is vast enough that there need to be incentives to contribute (which the social goals aim to accomplish). If you want to enable some userspace program to take advantage of these APIs (i.e. enable elastic demand), feel free to reach out.
Here is a link to the SIGECOM Discord. Feel free to join and talk about whatever, we don't bother with staying on topic.