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. To validate this combined software approach, we deployed it on two real-world heterogeneous memory platforms: 1) an Intel ® Cascade Lake platform with conventional DDR4 alongside nonvolatile Optane TM DC memory with large capacity, and 2) an Intel ® Knights Landing platform high-bandwidth, but limited capacity, MCDRAM backed by DDR4 SDRAM. We tested our approach on these platforms using three scientific mini-applications (LULESH, AMG, and SNAP) as well as one scalable scientific application (QM-CPACK) from the CORAL benchmark suite. The experiments show that portable application guidance has potential to improve performance significantly, especially on the Cascade Lake platform-which achieved peak speedups of 22x and 7.8x over the default unguided software-and hardware-based management policies. Additionally, this work evaluates the impact of various factors on the effectiveness of memory usage guidance, including: the amount of capacity that is available in the high performance tier, the input that is used during program profiling, and whether the profiling was conducted on the same architecture or transferred from a machine with a different architecture.

Recent trends have led to the adoption of larger and more complex memory systems, often with multiple tiers of memory performance within the same platform. To utilize complex memory systems efficiently, current data management strategies must be altered to map usage demands to the underlying hardware. Applications, as the generators of memory accesses, are well-suited to guide this process, but building and maintaining separate source code versions for different memory systems is not feasible in most cases. One potential solution is to employ automated program profiling and analysis to facilitate the production of application-based guidance. By attaching memory usage information to static or lightweight program features, compilers and runtime systems can generate fine-grained guidance without additional efforts from users or developers. Recent works have employed this approach with some success, but it is not clear which program features are most useful for guiding data management. This work evaluates the effectiveness of using different program data features to predict memory usage and guide memory management. It employs a custom set of simulation tools, based in the Intel ® Pin framework, to collect and analyze the usage characteristics of application data associated with common program data features, such as allocation sites, types, and context. The results show that even relatively simple features, such as object size, are useful for selecting data with similar usage properties, but finer-grained features, such as the instructions that access a particular object, are often much more effective. Additionally, this work evaluates the performance of using different data features and different program inputs to guide data placement on a heterogeneous memory platform with a limited amount of high performance memory.

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As scaling of conventional memory devices has stalled, many high end computing systems have begun to incorporate alternative memory technologies to meet performance goals. Since these technologies present distinct advantages and tradeoffs compared to conventional DDR* SDRAM, such as higher bandwidth with lower capacity or vice versa, they are typically packaged alongside conventional SDRAM in a heterogeneous memory architecture. To utilize the different types of memory efficiently, new data management strategies are needed to match application usage to the best available memory technology. However, current proposals for managing heterogeneous memories are limited because they either: 1) do not consider high-level application behavior when assigning data to different types of memory, or 2) require separate program execution (with a representative input) to collect information about how the application uses memory resources. This work presents a new data management toolset to address the limitations of existing approaches for managing complex memories. It extends the application runtime layer with automated monitoring and management routines that assign application data to the best tier of memory based on previous usage, without any need for source code modification or a separate profiling run. It evaluates this approach on a state-of-the-art server platform with both conventional DDR4 SDRAM and non-volatile Intel ® Optane TM DC memory, using both memory-intensive high performance computing (HPC) applications as well as standard benchmarks. Overall, the results show that this approach improves program performance significantly compared to a standard unguided approach across a variety of workloads and system configurations. The HPC applications exhibit the largest benefits, with speedups ranging from 1.4 x to 7 x in the best cases. Additionally, we show that this approach achieves similar performance as a comparable offline profiling-based approach after a short startup period, without requiring separate program execution or offline analysis steps.

As scaling of conventional memory devices has stalled, many high end and next generation computing systems have begun to incorporate alternative memory technologies to meet performance goals. Since these technologies present distinct advantages and tradeoffs compared to conventional DDR* SDRAM, such as higher bandwidth with lower capacity or vice versa, they are typically packaged alongside conventional SDRAM in a heterogeneous memory architecture. To utilize the different types of memory efficiently, new data management strategies are needed to match application usage to the best available memory technology. However, current proposals for managing heterogeneous memories are limited because they either: 1) do not consider high-level application behavior when assigning data to different types of memory, or 2) require separate program execution (with a representative input) to collect information about how the application uses memory resources.This work presents a new data management toolset to address the limitations of existing approaches for managing complex memories. It extends the application runtime layer with automated monitoring and management routines that assign application data to the best tier of memory based on previous usage, without any need for source code modification or a separate profiling run. It evaluates this approach on a state-of-theart server platform with both conventional DDR4 SDRAM and non-volatile Intel ® Optane TM DC memory, using both memory-intensive high performance computing (HPC) applications as well as standard benchmarks. Overall, the results show that this approach improves program performance significantly compared to a standard unguided approach across a variety of workloads and system configurations. The HPC applications exhibit the largest benefits, with speedups ranging from 1.4𝑥 to 7𝑥 in the best cases. Additionally, we show that this approach achieves similar performance as a comparable offline profiling-based approach after a short startup period, without requiring separate program execution or offline analysis steps.CCS Concepts: • Software and its engineering → Runtime environments; • Computer systems organization → Heterogeneous (hybrid) systems.