pmmeter: A Microbenchmark for Understanding Synchronization Cost on Persistent Memory
Hirotaka Yoshioka, Yuto Hayamizu, Kazuo Goda, Masaru Kitsuregawa · 2023
Persistent memory is an emerging memory device, which offers durable, relatively large memory space cost-effectively. This technology potentially enables a new horizon for a broad spectrum of data-intensive applications. Historically, memory space has been deemed to be volatile for application programs. Only very recently the processor industry has introduced a variety of memory synchronization instructions to ensure the durability of persistent memory. Yet, no known programming practice yields how application programs can fully exploit those instructions. This paper proposes pmmeter, a new microbenchmarking tool that we have developed to measure the primary performance of persistent memory. pmmeter allows for clarifying the performance impact that the choice of synchronization instructions incurs on a given sequence of memory access. This paper presents our experiment to demonstrate that pmmeter unveils the synchronization cost of Intel Optane DCPMM.