University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Memory access patterns and page promotion in hybrid memory systems

Agarwal, Ayush

Content Files
AGARWAL-THESIS-2020.pdf

Permalink

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/108002

Description

Title
Memory access patterns and page promotion in hybrid memory systems
Author(s)
Agarwal, Ayush
Issue Date
2020-05-10
Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Hwu, Wen-mei W
Department of Study
Electrical & Computer Eng
Discipline
Electrical & Computer Engr
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
M.S.
Degree Level
Thesis
Date of Ingest
2020-08-26T21:54:56Z
Keyword(s)
  • memory system
  • data-intensive
  • prefetching
  • hybrid memory system
  • page promotion
  • page migration
Abstract
Hybrid heterogeneous memory systems are becoming increasingly popular as traditional memory systems are hitting performance and energy walls in processing data-intensive applications, which are becoming the norm with the resurgence of machine learning, big data, graph analytics, and database management systems, especially in modern datacenters. In addition to the massive data that these applications process, they exhibit varying and non-deterministic memory access patterns making I/O latency a prime criterion in the design considerations that go into building modern computing systems to support them. A traditional memory system moves data by swapping pages between the faster DRAM and the slower SSD. While applications with sequential accesses have better traffic between the DRAM and the SSD, applications with random page accesses, such as large graphs, often produce high traffic and exhibit little or no reuse of pages swapped into the DRAM. This thesis proposes a technique to identify memory access patterns, and a scalable and distributed technique to determine when pages should be promoted from the slower memory system to the faster memory system, thereby reducing I/O traffic. The proposed page promotion design shows up to 6.74x reduction in page traffic and 1.21x increase in the total hit rate of a data-intensive application with uniformly distributed random memory accesses.
Graduation Semester
2020-05
Type of Resource
Thesis
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/108002
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2020 Ayush Agarwal

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