RAMCI: a novel asynchronous memory copying mechanism based on I/OAT

Abstract

Memory copying is one of the most common operations in modern software. Usually, the operation reflects a synchronous (sync) CPU procedure of memory copying, incurring overheads such as cache pollution and CPU stalling, especially in the scenario of bulk copying with large data. To improve this issue, some works based on I/OAT, which is a dedicated and popular hardware copying engine on Intel platform, is proposed but still exists several problems: (1) lacking atomic allocation/revocation at the granularity of I/OAT channel; (2) deficiency of interrupt support and (3) complicated programming interfaces. We propose RAMCI, an asynchronous (async) memory copying mechanism based on Intel I/OAT engine, not only improves the sync overheads, but also overcomes the above three issues through (1) a lock mechanism by using low-level CAS instruction; (2) a lightweight interrupt mechanism for the completion of memory copying, instead of using the polling pattern which consuming large CPU resource and (3) a group of well-defined and abstract interfaces, allowing the programmers to utilize the underlying free I/OAT channels transparently. To support the interfaces, a novel scheduler of the I/OAT channels is introduced. It splits the source copying data into several pieces, and each of them can be allocated with a dedicated I/OAT channel intelligently to transfer the data with parallelism. We evaluate RAMCI and compare it with other memory copying mechanisms in four NUMA scenarios. The experimental results show that RAMCI improves memory copying performance up to 4.68 $$\times $$ while achieving almost full ability of parallel computing.