Symbiotic HW Cache and SW DTLB Prefetching for DRAM/NVM Hybrid Memory

Abstract

The introduction of NVDIMM memory devices has encouraged the use of DRAM/NVM based hybrid memory systems to increase the memory-per-core ratio in compute nodes and obtain possible energy and cost benefits. However, Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) is slower than DRAM in terms of read/write latency. This difference in performance will adversely affect memory-bound applications. Traditionally, data prefetching at the hardware level has been used to increase the number of cache hits to mitigate performance degradation. However, software (SW) prefetching has not been used effectively to reduce the effects of high memory access latencies. Also, the current cache hierarchy and hardware (HW) prefetching are not optimized for a hybrid memory system. We hypothesize that HW and SW prefetching can complement each other in placing data in caches and the Data Translation Look-aside Buffer (DTLB) prior to their references, and by doing so adaptively, highly varying access latencies in a DRAM/NVM hybrid memory system are taken into account. This work contributes an adaptive SW prefetch method based on the characterization of read/write/unroll prefetch distances for NVM and DRAM. Prefetch performance is characterized via custom benchmarks based on STREAM2 specifications in a multicore MPI runtime environment and compared to the performance of the standard SW prefetch pass in GCC. Furthermore, the effects of HW prefetching on kernels executing on hybrid memory system are evaluated. Experimental results indicate that SW prefetching targeted to populate the DTLB results in up to 26% performance improvement when symbiotically used in conjunction with HW prefetching, as opposed to only HW prefetching. Based on our findings, changes to GCC's prefetch-loop-arrays compiler pass are proposed to take advantage of DTLB prefetching in a hybrid memory system for kernels that are frequently used in HPC applications.