Rethinking Memory Profiling and Migration for Multi-Tiered Large Memory Systems

Abstract: Multi-tiered large memory systems call for rethinking of memory profiling and migration because of the unique problems unseen in the traditional memory systems with smaller capacity and fewer tiers. We develop MTM, an application-transparent page management system based on three principles: (1) connecting the control of profiling overhead with the profiling mechanism for high-quality profiling; (2) building a universal page migration policy on the complex multi-tiered memory for high performance; and (3) introducing huge page awareness. We evaluate MTM using common big-data applications with realistic working sets (hundreds of GB to 1 TB). MTM outperforms seven state-of-the-art solutions by up to 42% (17% on average)