Adapting the Systems Software Stack to a Radically Non-Uniform Memory System
Suparna Bhattacharya, Kanchi Gopinath, Doug Voigt · 2020
The nature of PM and the advent of memory centric architecture create a system environment where a very wide range of memory and storage technologies can be accessed in the same way even though they have very different characteristics. Chapter 12, “Adapting the Systems Software Stack to a Radically Non-Uniform Memory System”, drills down into the problems of RP and memory non-uniformity by breaking them into three sub-problems. Allocation - How can system resource proportionality be improved through RP memory allocation? Automation - How can RP memory allocation be made less manual? Blocking - How can thread or process blocking be constrained to increase RP? The state of the art in managing non-uniformity is explored with respect to these sub-problems and an approach to solving each one is suggested. Taken together, the solutions form an overall model for managing RP with radically non-uniform memory that involves the specialization of system work flow management in the context of memory pooling with Classes of Service that are defined for a given application.