Adnan Maruf, Daniel Carlson, Ashikee Ghosh, Manoj Saha, Janki Bhimani, and Raju Rangaswami. 2023. Allocation Policies Matter for Hybrid Memory Systems. In Proceedings of the 32nd International Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing (HPDC '23), June 16-23, 2023, Orlando, FL, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2 pages. https:
Existing tiered memory systems all use DRAM-Preferred as their allocation policy, whereby pages get allocated from higher-performing DRAM until it is filled, after which all future allocations are made from lower-performing persistent memory (PM). The novel insight of this work is that the right page allocation policy for a workload can help to lower the access latencies for the newly allocated pages. We design, implement, and evaluate three page allocation policies within the real system deployment of the state-of-the-art dynamic tiering system. We observe that the right page allocation policy can improve the performance of a tiered memory system by as much as 17x for certain workloads.
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