The Study on Prefetching of Remote Memory Architecture
Jian Feng Xu · 2005
High speed electrical and optical interconnection technique brings us high-speed and high-bandwidth net- work. Thus, we can break through the traditional computer architecture by decoupling memory from CPU. Distance between CPU and memory is no longer restricted, and this will consequentially cause innovation in high performance computer architecture. In paper[1]the authors present DSAG architecture--each CPU node is only attached with a small quantity of memory, while massive memory served as memory server is located away, and they are connected by high-speed network. This architecture provides better shareability and more scalability, but it also challenges us to re- duce the gap between processor and memory. To reduce the delay of remote memory access, with abundant network bandwidth, we can use the spare network bandwidth while CPU runs to prefetch data from the remote memory. In this paper, we record and analyze the address missed in local memory access while program runs, and analyze the statistical characteristic of the page frame stream. We propose a prefetching approach based on page frame stream to reduce remote memory access delay and improve the system performance. Finally, we use simulation technique to verify the feasibility and correctness of the prefetching ap- proach, and propose three prefetching policies as well as the factors that affect the prefetching.