Coordinate Channel-Aware Page Mapping Policy and Memory Scheduling for Reducing Memory Interference Among Multimedia Applications

Abstract

In a modern multicore system, memory is shared among more and more concurrently running multimedia applications. Therefore, memory contention and interference are more and more serious, inducing system performance degradation significantly, the performance degradation of each thread differently, unfairness in resource sharing, and priority inversion, even starvation. In this paper, we propose an approach of coordinating channel-aware page mapping policy and memory scheduling (CCPS) to reduce intermultimedia application interference in a memory system. The idea is to map the data of different threads to different channels, together with memory scheduling. The key principles of the policies of page mapping and memory scheduling are: 1) the memory address space, the thread priority, and the load balance; and 2) prioritizing a low-memory request thread, a row-buffer hit access, and an older request. We evaluate the CCPS on a variety of mixed single-thread and multithread benchmarks and system configurations, and we compare them with four previously proposed state-of-the-art interference-reducing policies. Experimental results demonstrate that the CCPS improves the performance while reducing the energy consumption significantly; moreover, the CCPS incurs a much lower hardware overhead than the current existing policies.