Portable application guidance for complex memory systems
M. Ben Olson, Brandon Kammerdiener, Michael R. Jantz, Kshitij Doshi, Terry Jones · Proceedings of the International Symposium on Memory Systems · 2019
The recent emergence of new memory technologies and multi-tier memory architectures has disrupted the traditional view of memory as a single block of volatile storage with uniform performance. Several options for managing data on heterogeneous memory platforms now exist, but current approaches either rely on inflexible, and often inefficient, hardware-based caching, or they require expert knowledge and source code modification to utilize the different performance and capabilities within each memory tier. This paper introduces a new software-based framework to collect and apply memory management guidance for applications on heterogeneous memory platforms. The framework, together with new tools, combines a generic runtime API with automated program profiling and analysis to achieve data management that is both efficient and portable across multiple memory architectures.