CSR: Small: Performance and Fairness with Multiple Page Sizes

CSR：小：多种页面大小的性能和公平性

• 批准号: 1618563
• 负责人: Christopher Rossbach
• 金额: $ 50万
• 依托单位: University of Texas at Austin
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2016
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2016-10-01 至 2020-09-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1618563&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CSR; Small; Performance; Fairness; Multiple

Modern computing workloads such as machine learning, big data analytics, and scientific computing require enormous memory capacities. The system software that manages memory was designed for much smaller systems, and consequently, it imposes hefty performance and power penalties on modern systems. The time has come to pay this technical debt. This work comprehensively redesigns operating system and virtual machine memory management to accommodate large memories, enabling applications to obtain the performance and efficiency promised by current hardware.The goal of this research is a set of principles and a framework for the operating system and hypervisor to transparently support small and large memory pages. Large memory pages (e.g., 2MB pages for the popular x86 architecture instead of the standard 4KB) can provide significant performance benefit by dramatically reducing address translation over- heads. However, their support and adoption has been hindered by fundamental management problems arising from fragmentation and poor visibility into memory accesses. Current large page management suffers a variety of pathologies such as memory bloat and unfairness across processes and/or virtual machines, and system administrators generally disable large pages in production systems. A framework that relies on managing contiguity as a first-class resource and on tracking utilization and access frequency of memory pages will enable an OS to coordinate its currently disparate mechanisms, avoid performance pathologies, and enable applications to enjoy the performance benefits of large pages.

机器学习、大数据分析和科学计算等现代计算工作负载需要巨大的内存容量。管理内存的系统软件是为小得多的系统设计的，因此，它对现代系统造成了巨大的性能和功率损失。现在是偿还这笔技术性债务的时候了。该工作全面重新设计了操作系统和虚拟机内存管理以适应大容量内存，使应用程序能够获得现有硬件所承诺的性能和效率。本研究的目标是为操作系统和管理程序透明地支持小内存和大内存页面提供一套原则和框架。大内存页面(例如，用于流行的x86体系结构的2MB页面，而不是标准的4KB页面)可以通过显著减少地址转换开销来提供显著的性能优势。然而，它们的支持和采用受到了基本管理问题的阻碍，这些问题源于碎片和对内存访问的低可见性。当前的大页面管理遭受各种病态，例如内存膨胀和跨进程和/或虚拟机的不公平，并且系统管理员通常在生产系统中禁用大页面。依赖于将邻接性管理为一流资源并跟踪内存页面的利用率和访问频率的框架将使操作系统能够协调其当前不同的机制，避免性能病理，并使应用程序能够享受大页面的性能优势。