Adaptive Memory Hierarchy Management

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Modern computers rely on memory hierarchies (which consist of disks, main-memory and hardware caches) for high performance and low cost. Technology trends, however, have continued to increase the access-time gaps between the layers. The gaps threaten to reduce the effectiveness of memory hierarchies unless novel techniques can be found to improve hit ratios and data movement efficiencies. The research focuses on three such techniques: adaptive virtual memory, near-optimal page coloring, and coherence- miss reduction. Adaptive virtual memory targets the disk and main- memory layers. It improves performance by observing applications' page fault patterns and adjusting page replacement and prefetching policies accordingly, and by integrating dynamic swap allocation with page managements. Near-optimal page coloring targets the main- memory and hardware cache layers. It increases cache hit ratio by carefully placing the pages into cache sets. The research studies the theoretical aspects of the problem and designs practical algorithms including profile-based optimizations based on the theoretical foundation.Coherence-miss reduction targets multi- processor caches. It uses a database system as a case study to identify common data structures and algorithms that contribute the most to cache coherence misses, and design and evaluate alternatives that perform better.Combined, the three techniques promise to improve memory hierarchy performance significantly.