Title
Demystifying the Performance of HPC Scientific Applications on NVM-based Memory Systems
Abstract
The emergence of high-density byte-addressable non-volatile memory (NVM) is promising to accelerate data-and compute-intensive applications. Current NVM technologies have lower performance than DRAM and, thus, are often paired with DRAM in a heterogeneous main memory. Recently, byte-addressable NVM hardware becomes available. This work provides a timely evaluation of representative HPC applications from the "Seven Dwarfs" on NVM-based main memory. Our results quantify the effectiveness of DRAM-cached-NVM for accelerating HPC applications and enabling large problems beyond the DRAM capacity. On uncached-NVM, HPC applications exhibit three tiers of performance sensitivity, i.e., insensitive, scaled, and bottlenecked. We identify write throttling and concurrency control as the priorities in optimizing applications. We highlight that concurrency change may have a diverging effect on read and write accesses in applications. Based on these findings, we explore two optimization approaches. First, we provide a prediction model that uses datasets from a small set of configurations to estimate performance at various concurrency and data sizes to avoid exhaustive search in the configuration space. Second, we demonstrate that write-aware data placement on uncached-NVM could achieve 2x performance improvement with a 60% reduction in DRAM usage.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1109/IPDPS47924.2020.00098
2020 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS)
Keywords
DocType
ISSN
Non-volatile memory,Optane,heterogeneous memory,persistent memory,byte-addressable NVM,HPC
Conference
1530-2075
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-7281-6876-0
2
0.37
References 
Authors
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Peng Ivy120.37
Kai Wu2219.25
Jie Ren35117.62
Li, Dong476448.56
Maya Gokhale541.10