Paper Info
Title
A Case for Richer Cross-Layer Abstractions: Bridging the Semantic Gap with Expressive Memory.
Abstract
This paper makes a case for a new cross-layer interface, Expressive Memory (XMem), to communicate higher-level program semantics from the application to the system software and hardware architecture. XMem provides (i) a flexible and extensible abstraction, called an Atom, enabling the application to express key program semantics in terms of how the program accesses data and the attributes of the data itself, and (ii) new cross-layer interfaces to make the expressed higher-level information available to the underlying OS and architecture. By providing key information that is otherwise unavailable, XMem exposes a new, rich view of the program data to the OS and the different architectural components that optimize memory system performance (e.g., caches, memory controllers). By bridging the semantic gap between the application and the underlying memory resources, XMem provides two key benefits. First, it enables architectural/system-level techniques to leverage key program semantics that are challenging to predict or infer. Second, it improves the efficacy and portability of software optimizations by alleviating the need to tune code for specific hardware resources (e.g., cache space). While XMem is designed to enhance and enable a wide range of memory optimizations, we demonstrate the benefits of XMem using two use cases: (i) improving the performance portability of software-based cache optimization by expressing the semantics of data locality in the optimization and (ii) improving the performance of OS-based page placement in DRAM by leveraging the semantics of data structures and their access properties.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1109/ISCA.2018.00027
ISCA
Keywords
Field
DocType
memory optimization,cross layer abstraction,CPU interfaces,memory
System software,Data structure,Computer architecture,Cache,Virtual memory,Computer science,Semantic gap,Parallel computing,Memory management,Software portability,Hardware architecture
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
1063-6897
978-1-5386-5984-7
7
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.39
110
9
Search Limit
100110
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Nandita Vijaykumar1442.35
Abhilasha Jain270.39
Diptesh Majumdar370.39
Kevin Hsieh422310.93
Gennady Pekhimenko570628.75
Eiman Ebrahimi647917.23
Nastaran Hajinazar7402.38
Phillip B. Gibbons86863624.14
Onur Mutlu99446357.40