Coloring the cloud for predictable performance
Alberto Scolari, Filippo Sironi, Davide B. Bartolini, Donatella Sciuto, Marco Domenico Santambrogio · 2013
Motivation and Contribution The commodity multicores that power cloud infrastructures hide memory latency through deep memory hierarchies, with the last-level cache (LLC) usually shared among cores. While a shared LLC improves utilization of on-chip resources, it may also lead to unpredictable performance of colocated virtual machines (VMs) as a result of unanticipated contention. Past research showed that the operating system page allocator can favor performance predictability on a physically-addressed shared LLC through page coloring [4, 8, 9]: a software technique that can work on commodity multicores, unlike hardware approaches [2, 7]. The main drawback of page coloring is the high cost of modifying allocations (i.e., recoloring), making this technique almost impractical for applications with varying memory footprints [6].