Flexible and Effective Object Tiering for Heterogeneous Memory Systems

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Computing platforms that package multiple types of memory, each with their own performance characteristics, are quickly becoming mainstream. To operate efficiently, heterogeneous memory architectures require new data management solutions that are able to match the needs of each application with an appropriate type of memory. As the primary generators of memory usage, applications create a great deal of information that can be useful for guiding memory management, but the community still lacks tools to collect, organize, and leverage this information effectively. To address this gap, this work introduces a novel software framework that collects and analyzes object-level information to guide memory tiering. The framework includes tools to monitor the capacity and usage of individual data objects, routines that aggregate and convert this information into tier recommendations for the host platform, and mechanisms to enforce these recommendations according to user-selected policies. Moreover, the developed tools and techniques are fully automatic, work on standard Linux systems, and do not require modification or recompilation of existing software. Using this framework, this study evaluates and compares the impact of a variety of design choices for memory tiering, including different policies for prioritizes objects for fast memory tier as well as the frequency and timing of migration events. The results, collected on a modern Intel ® platform with conventional DDR4 SDRAM as well as Intel Optane NVRAM, show that guiding data tiering with object-level information can enable significant performance and efficiency benefits compared to standard hardware- and software-directed data tiering strategies for a diverse set of memory-intensive workloads.