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|  ____/ _ \|  _ \ / _  |
| |   | |_| | | | ( (_| |
|_|    \___/|_| |_|\____|  - Compute Express Link (CXL) based Memory Pooling Systems

README for CXL-emulation and Experiments HowTo

Cite our Pond paper (ASPLOS '23):

Pond: CXL-Based Memory Pooling Systems for Cloud Platforms

The preprint of the paper can be found here.

@InProceedings{pond.asplos23,
  author = {Huaicheng Li and Daniel S. Berger and Lisa Hsu and Daniel Ernst and Pantea Zardoshti and Stanko Novakovic and Monish Shah and Samir Rajadnya and Scott Lee and Ishwar Agarwal and Mark D. Hill and Marcus Fontoura and Ricardo Bianchini},
  title = "{Pond: CXL-Based Memory Pooling Systems for Cloud Platforms}",
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS)},
  address = {Vancouver, BC Canada},
  month = {March},
  year = {2023}
}

What is this repo about?

This repo open-sources our approach for CXL simulation and evaluations (mainly some scripts). It is not a full-fledged open-source version of Pond design.

CXL Emulation on regular 2-socket (2S) server systems

We mainly emulate the following two characteristics of Compute Express Link (CXL) attached DRAM:

  • Latency: ~150ns
  • No local CPU which can directly accesses it, i.e., CXL-memory treated as a "computeless/cpuless" node

The CXL latency is similar to the latency of one NUMA hop on modern 2S systems, thus, we simulate the CXL memory using the memory on the remote NUMA node and disables all the cores on the remote NUMA node to simulate the "computeless" node behavior.

In this repo, the CXL-simulation is mainly done via a few scripts, check cxl-global.sh and the run-xxx.sh under each workload folder (e.g., cpu2017, gapbs, etc.).

These scripts dynamically adjust the system configuration to simulate a certain percentage of CXL memory in the system, and run workloads against such scenarios.

Configuring Local/CXL-DRAM Splits

One major setup we are benchmarking is to adjust the percentage of CXL-memory being used to run a certain workload and observe the performance impacts (compared to pure local DRAM "ideal" cases). For example, the common ratios the scripts include "100/0" (the 100% local DRAM case, no CXL), "95/5", "90/10" (90% local DRAM + 10% CXL), "85/15", "80/20", "75/25", "50/50", "25/75", etc.

To provision the correct amount of local/CXL memory for the above split ratios, we need to profile the peak memory usage of the target workload. This is usually done via monitoring tools such as pidstat (the RSS field reported in the memory usage).

Tips to limit the DRAM size

To limit the size of local DRAM, we use memeater to consume a desirable amount of local memory. This works under Linux First-Touch policy. However, if you're experimenting with memory tiering systems, do not use it. Even though memory pages in "memeater" are lock()ed, they can still be migrated by the OS (from one node to another).

A Simple HowTo using SPEC CPU 2017

Under folder cpu2017, run-cpu2017.sh is the main entry to run a series of experiments under various split configurations. The script reads the profiled information in a workload input file (e.g., wi.txt), where the first column is the workload name and the second column is the peak memory consumption of the workload. Based on these, run-cpu2017.sh will iterate over a series of predefined split-ratios and run the experiments one by one. The scripts writes the logs and outputs to rst folder.

One could co-run profiling utilities such as emon or Intel Vtune together with the workload to collect architecture-level metrics for performance analysis. Make sure Intel Vtune is installed first before running the script.