Title
EMBA: Efficient Memory Bandwidth Allocation to Improve Performance on Intel Commodity Processor
Abstract
On multi-core processors, contention on shared resources such as the last level cache (LLC) and memory bandwidth may cause serious performance degradation, which makes efficient resource allocation a critical issue in data centers. Intel recently introduces Memory Bandwidth Allocation (MBA) technology on its Xeon scalable processors, which makes it possible to allocate memory bandwidth in a real system. However, how to make the most of MBA to improve system performance remains an open question. In this work, (1) we formulate a quantitative relationship between a program's performance and its LLC occupancy and memory request rate on commodity processors. (2) Guided by the performance formula, we propose a heuristic bound-aware throttling algorithm to improve system performance and (3) we further develop a hierarchical clustering method to improve the algorithm's efficiency. (4) We implement these algorithms in EMBA, a low-overhead dynamic memory bandwidth scheduling system to improve performance on Intel commodity processors. The results show that, when multiple programs run simultaneously on a multi-core processor whose memory bandwidth is saturated, the programs with high memory bandwidth demand usually use bandwidth inefficiently compared with programs with medium memory bandwidth demand from the perspective of CPU performance. By slightly throttling the former's bandwidth, we can significantly improve the performance of the latter. On average, we improve system performance by 36.9% at the expense of 8.6% bandwidth utilization rate.
Year
DOI
Keywords
2019
10.1145/3337821.3337863
Memory bandwidth allocation, Multi-core architectures
Field
DocType
ISSN
Dynamic random-access memory,Computer performance,Memory bandwidth,Cache,High memory,Computer science,Bandwidth (signal processing),Xeon,Bandwidth throttling,Distributed computing,Embedded system
Conference
978-1-4503-6295-5
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4503-6295-5
1
0.48
References 
Authors
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yaocheng Xiang110.48
chencheng ye2121.64
Xiaolin Wang3176.26
Yingwei Luo431541.30
Zhenlin Wang515015.89