Roofline-based Data Migration Methodology for Hybrid Memories

Abstract

High-performance computing (HPC) systems provide huge computational resources and large memories. The hybrid memory is a promising memory technology that contains different types of memory devices, which have different characteristics regarding access time, retention time, and capacity. However, the increasing performance and employing hybrid memories induce more complexity as well. In this paper, we propose a roofline-based data migration methodology called HyDM to effectively use hybrid memories targeting at Intel Knight Landing (KNL) processor. HyDM monitors status of applications running on a system and migrates pages of selected applications to the High Bandwidth Memory (HBM). To select appropriate applications on system runtime, we adopt the roofline performance model, a visually intuitive method. HyDM also employs a feedback mechanism to change the target application dynamically. Experimental results show that our HyDM improves over the baseline execution the execution time by up to 44%.