Memory Power Optimization of Java-Based Embedded Systems Exploiting Garbage Collection Information

Nowadays, Java is used in all types of embedded devices. For these memory-constrained systems, the automatic dynamicmemorymanager (Garbage Collector or GC) has been always a key factor in terms of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) performance. Moreover, in current embedded platforms, power consumption is becoming as important as performance. Thus, in this paper we present an exploration, from an energy viewpoint, of the different possibilities of memory hierarchies for high-performance embedded systems when used by state-of-the-art GCs. This is a starting point for a better understanding of the interactions between the Java applications, the memory hierarchy and the GC. Hence, we subsequently present two techniques to reduce energy consumption on Java-based embedded systems, based on exploiting GC information. The first technique uses GC execution behavior to reduce leakage energy consumption taking advantage of the low-power mode of actual multi-banked SDRAM memories and it is intended for generational collectors. This technique can achieve a reduction up to 50% of SDRAM memory leakage. The second technique involves the inclusion of a software-controlled (scratchpad) memory that stores GC instructions under the JVM control to reduce the active energy consumption and also improve the performance of the target embedded system and it is aimed at all kind of garbage collectors. For this last technique we have experimented with two different approaches for selecting the GC code to be stored in the scratchpad memory: one static and one dynamic. Our experimental results show that the proposed dynamic scratchpad management approach for GCs enables up to 63% energy consumption reduction and 25% performance improvement during the collector phase, which means, in terms of JVM execution, a global reduction of 29% and 17% for energy and cycles respectively. Overall, this work outlines that the key for an efficient low-power implementation of Java Virtual Machines for high-performance embedded systems is the synergy between the GC choice, the memory architecture tuning, and the inclusion of power management schemes controlled by the JVM, exploiting knowledge of the GC behavior

Cooperative cache scrubbing

Managing the limited resources of power and memory bandwidth while improving performance on multicore hardware is challeng-ing. In particular, more cores demand more memory bandwidth, and multi-threaded applications increasingly stress memory sys-tems, leading to more energy consumption. However, we demon-strate that not all memory traffic is necessary. For modern Java pro-grams, 10 to 60 % of DRAM writes are useless, because the data on these lines are dead- the program is guaranteed to never read them again. Furthermore, reading memory only to immediately zero ini-tialize it wastes bandwidth. We propose a software/hardware coop-erative solution: the memory manager communicates dead and zero lines with cache scrubbing instructions. We show how scrubbing instructions satisfy MESI cache coherence protocol invariants and demonstrate them in a Java Virtual Machine and multicore simula-tor. Scrubbing reduces average DRAM traffic by 59%, total DRAM energy by 14%, and dynamic DRAM energy by 57 % on a range of configurations. Cooperative software/hardware cache scrubbing reduces memory bandwidth and improves energy efficiency, two critical problems in modern systems

On-The-Fly Metadata Stripping For Embedded Java Operating Systems

International audienceConsidering the typical amount of memory available on a smart card, it is essential to minimize the size of the runtime environment to leave as much memory as possible to applications. This paper shows that on-the-fly constant pool packing can result in a significant reduction of the memory footprint of an embedded Java runtime environment. We first present Jits, an architecture dedicated to building fully-customized Java runtime environments for smart cards. We then detail the op- timizations we have implemented in the class loading mechanism of Jits to reduce the size of the loaded class constant pool. By suppress- ing constant pool entries as they become unnecessary during the class loading process, we manage to compact constant pools of loaded classes to less than 8% of their initial size. We then present the results of our mechanism in term of constant pool and class size reductions, and conclude by suggesting some more aggressive optimizations

Testing in resource constrained execution environments

Software for resource constrained embedded devices is often implemented in the Java programming language because the Java compiler and virtual machine provide enhanced safety, portability, and the potential for run-time optimization. It is important to verify that a software application executes correctly in the environment in which it will normally execute, even if this environment is an embedded one that severely constrains memory resources. Testing can be used to isolate defects within and establish a confidence in the correctness of a Java application that executes in a resource constrained environment. However, executing test suites with a Java virtual machine (JVM) that uses dynamic compilation to create native code bodies can introduce significant testing time overheads if memory resources are highly constrained. This paper describes an approach that uses adaptive code unloading to ensure that it is feasible to perform testing in the actual memory constrained execution environment. The experiments demonstrate that code unloading can reduce both the test suite execution time by 34 % and the code size of the test suite and application under test by 78 % while maintaining the overall size of the JVM. Categories and Subject Descriptors: D.2.5 [Software Engineering]: Testing and Debugging-Testing tools; D.3.4 [Programming Languages]: Processors-code generation

Exploring Dynamic Compilation and Cross-Layer Object Management Policies for Managed Language Applications

Recent years have witnessed the widespread adoption of managed programming languages that are designed to execute on virtual machines. Virtual machine architectures provide several powerful software engineering advantages over statically compiled binaries, such as portable program representations, additional safety guarantees, automatic memory and thread management, and dynamic program composition, which have largely driven their success. To support and facilitate the use of these features, virtual machines implement a number of services that adaptively manage and optimize application behavior during execution. Such runtime services often require tradeoffs between efficiency and effectiveness, and different policies can have major implications on the system's performance and energy requirements. In this work, we extensively explore policies for the two runtime services that are most important for achieving performance and energy efficiency: dynamic (or Just-In-Time (JIT)) compilation and memory management. First, we examine the properties of single-tier and multi-tier JIT compilation policies in order to find strategies that realize the best program performance for existing and future machines. Our analysis performs hundreds of experiments with different compiler aggressiveness and optimization levels to evaluate the performance impact of varying if and when methods are compiled. We later investigate the issue of how to optimize program regions to maximize performance in JIT compilation environments. For this study, we conduct a thorough analysis of the behavior of optimization phases in our dynamic compiler, and construct a custom experimental framework to determine the performance limits of phase selection during dynamic compilation. Next, we explore innovative memory management strategies to improve energy efficiency in the memory subsystem. We propose and develop a novel cross-layer approach to memory management that integrates information and analysis in the VM with fine-grained management of memory resources in the operating system. Using custom as well as standard benchmark workloads, we perform detailed evaluation that demonstrates the energy-saving potential of our approach. We implement and evaluate all of our studies using the industry-standard Oracle HotSpot Java Virtual Machine to ensure that our conclusions are supported by widely-used, state-of-the-art runtime technology

낸드 플래시 저장장치의 성능 및 수명 향상을 위한 프로그램 컨텍스트 기반 최적화 기법

학위논문 (박사)-- 서울대학교 대학원 : 공과대학 컴퓨터공학부, 2019. 2. 김지홍.컴퓨팅 시스템의 성능 향상을 위해, 기존의 느린 하드디스크(HDD)를 빠른 낸드 플래시 메모리 기반 저장장치(SSD)로 대체하고자 하는 연구가 최근 활발히 진행 되고 있다. 그러나 지속적인 반도체 공정 스케일링 및 멀티 레벨링 기술로 SSD 가격을 동급 HDD 수준으로 낮아졌지만, 최근의 첨단 디바이스 기술의 부작용으 로 NAND 플래시 메모리의 수명이 짧아지는 것은 고성능 컴퓨팅 시스템에서의 SSD의 광범위한 채택을 막는 주요 장벽 중 하나이다. 본 논문에서는 최근의 고밀도 낸드 플래시 메모리의 수명 및 성능 문제를 해결하기 위한 시스템 레벨의 개선 기술을 제안한다. 제안 된 기법은 응용 프로 그램의 쓰기 문맥을 활용하여 기존에는 얻을 수 없었던 데이터 수명 패턴 및 중복 데이터 패턴을 분석하였다. 이에 기반하여, 단일 계층의 단순한 정보만을 활용했 던 기존 기법의 한계를 극복함으로써 효과적으로 NAND 플래시 메모리의 성능 및 수명을 향상시키는 최적화 방법론을 제시한다. 먼저, 응용 프로그램의 I/O 작업에는 문맥에 따라 고유한 데이터 수명과 중 복 데이터의 패턴이 존재한다는 점을 분석을 통해 확인하였다. 문맥 정보를 효과 적으로 활용하기 위해 프로그램 컨텍스트 (쓰기 문맥) 추출 방법을 구현 하였다. 프로그램 컨텍스트 정보를 통해 가비지 컬렉션 부하와 제한된 수명의 NAND 플 래시 메모리 개선을 위한 기존 기술의 한계를 효과적으로 극복할 수 있다. 둘째, 멀티 스트림 SSD에서 WAF를 줄이기 위해 데이터 수명 예측의 정확 성을 높이는 기법을 제안하였다. 이를 위해 애플리케이션의 I/O 컨텍스트를 활용 하는 시스템 수준의 접근 방식을 제안하였다. 제안된 기법의 핵심 동기는 데이터 수명이 LBA보다 높은 추상화 수준에서 평가 되어야 한다는 것이다. 따라서 프 로그램 컨텍스트를 기반으로 데이터의 수명을 보다 정확히 예측함으로써, 기존 기법에서 LBA를 기반으로 데이터 수명을 관리하는 한계를 극복한다. 결론적으 로 따라서 가비지 컬렉션의 효율을 높이기 위해 수명이 짧은 데이터를 수명이 긴 데이터와 효과적으로 분리 할 수 있다. 마지막으로, 쓰기 프로그램 컨텍스트의 중복 데이터 패턴 분석을 기반으로 불필요한 중복 제거 작업을 피할 수있는 선택적 중복 제거를 제안한다. 중복 데 이터를 생성하지 않는 프로그램 컨텍스트가 존재함을 분석적으로 보이고 이들을 제외함으로써, 중복제거 동작의 효율성을 높일 수 있다. 또한 중복 데이터가 발생 하는 패턴에 기반하여 기록된 데이터를 관리하는 자료구조 유지 정책을 새롭게 제안하였다. 추가적으로, 서브 페이지 청크를 도입하여 중복 데이터를 제거 할 가능성을 높이는 세분화 된 중복 제거를 제안한다. 제안 된 기술의 효과를 평가하기 위해 다양한 실제 시스템에서 수집 된 I/O 트레이스에 기반한 시뮬레이션 평가 뿐만 아니라 에뮬레이터 구현을 통해 실제 응용을 동작하면서 일련의 평가를 수행했다. 더 나아가 멀티 스트림 디바이스의 내부 펌웨어를 수정하여 실제와 가장 비슷하게 설정된 환경에서 실험을 수행하 였다. 실험 결과를 통해 제안된 시스템 수준 최적화 기법이 성능 및 수명 개선 측면에서 기존 최적화 기법보다 더 효과적이었음을 확인하였다. 향후 제안된 기 법들이 보다 더 발전된다면, 낸드 플래시 메모리가 초고속 컴퓨팅 시스템의 주 저장장치로 널리 사용되는 데에 긍정적인 기여를 할 수 있을 것으로 기대된다.Replacing HDDs with NAND flash-based storage devices (SSDs) has been one of the major challenges in modern computing systems especially in regards to better performance and higher mobility. Although the continuous semiconductor process scaling and multi-leveling techniques lower the price of SSDs to the comparable level of HDDs, the decreasing lifetime of NAND flash memory, as a side effect of recent advanced device technologies, is emerging as one of the major barriers to the wide adoption of SSDs in highperformance computing systems. In this dissertation, system-level lifetime improvement techniques for recent high-density NAND flash memory are proposed. Unlike existing techniques, the proposed techniques resolve the problems of decreasing performance and lifetime of NAND flash memory by exploiting the I/O context of an application to analyze data lifetime patterns or duplicate data contents patterns. We first present that I/O activities of an application have distinct data lifetime and duplicate data patterns. In order to effectively utilize the context information, we implemented the program context extraction method. With the program context, we can overcome the limitations of existing techniques for improving the garbage collection overhead and limited lifetime of NAND flash memory. Second, we propose a system-level approach to reduce WAF that exploits the I/O context of an application to increase the data lifetime prediction for the multi-streamed SSDs. The key motivation behind the proposed technique was that data lifetimes should be estimated at a higher abstraction level than LBAs, so we employ a write program context as a stream management unit. Thus, it can effectively separate data with short lifetimes from data with long lifetimes to improve the efficiency of garbage collection. Lastly, we propose a selective deduplication that can avoid unnecessary deduplication work based on the duplicate data pattern analysis of write program context. With the help of selective deduplication, we also propose fine-grained deduplication which improves the likelihood of eliminating redundant data by introducing sub-page chunk. It also resolves technical difficulties caused by its finer granularity, i.e., increased memory requirement and read response time. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed techniques, we performed a series of evaluations using both a trace-driven simulator and emulator with I/O traces which were collected from various real-world systems. To understand the feasibility of the proposed techniques, we also implemented them in Linux kernel on top of our in-house flash storage prototype and then evaluated their effects on the lifetime while running real-world applications. Our experimental results show that system-level optimization techniques are more effective over existing optimization techniques.I. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1.1 Motivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1.1.1 Garbage Collection Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 1.1.2 Limited Endurance Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 1.2 Dissertation Goals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 1.3 Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 1.4 Dissertation Structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 II. Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 2.1 NAND Flash Memory System Software . . . . . . . . . . . 9 2.2 NAND Flash-Based Storage Devices . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 2.3 Multi-stream Interface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 2.4 Inline Data Deduplication Technique . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 2.5 Related Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 2.5.1 Data Separation Techniques for Multi-streamed SSDs 13 2.5.2 Write Traffic Reduction Techniques . . . . . . . . . 15 2.5.3 Program Context based Optimization Techniques for Operating Systems . . . . . . . . 18 III. Program Context-based Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 3.1 Definition and Extraction of Program Context . . . . . . . . 21 3.2 Data Lifetime Patterns of I/O Activities . . . . . . . . . . . 24 3.3 Duplicate Data Patterns of I/O Activities . . . . . . . . . . . 26 IV. Fully Automatic Stream Management For Multi-Streamed SSDs Using Program Contexts . . 29 4.1 Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 4.2 Motivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 4.2.1 No Automatic Stream Management for General I/O Workloads . . . . . . . . . 33 4.2.2 Limited Number of Supported Streams . . . . . . . 36 4.3 Automatic I/O Activity Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 4.3.1 PC as a Unit of Lifetime Classification for General I/O Workloads . . . . . . . . . . . 39 4.4 Support for Large Number of Streams . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 4.4.1 PCs with Large Lifetime Variances . . . . . . . . . 42 4.4.2 Implementation of Internal Streams . . . . . . . . . 44 4.5 Design and Implementation of PCStream . . . . . . . . . . 46 4.5.1 PC Lifetime Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 4.5.2 Mapping PCs to SSD streams . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 4.5.3 Internal Stream Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 4.5.4 PC Extraction for Indirect Writes . . . . . . . . . . 51 4.6 Experimental Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 4.6.1 Experimental Settings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 4.6.2 Performance Evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 4.6.3 WAF Comparison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 4.6.4 Per-stream Lifetime Distribution Analysis . . . . . . 57 4.6.5 Impact of Internal Streams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 4.6.6 Impact of the PC Attribute Table . . . . . . . . . . . 60 V. Deduplication Technique using Program Contexts . . . . . . 62 5.1 Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 5.2 Selective Deduplication using Program Contexts . . . . . . . 63 5.2.1 PCDedup: Improving SSD Deduplication Efficiency using Selective Hash Cache Management . . . . . . 63 5.2.2 2-level LRU Eviction Policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 5.3 Exploiting Small Chunk Size . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 5.3.1 Fine-Grained Deduplication . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 5.3.2 Read Overhead Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 5.3.3 Memory Overhead Management . . . . . . . . . . . 80 5.3.4 Experimental Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 VI. Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 6.1 Summary and Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 6.2 Future Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 6.2.1 Supporting applications that have unusal program contexts . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 6.2.2 Optimizing read request based on the I/O context . . 90 6.2.3 Exploiting context information to improve fingerprint lookups . . . . .. . . . . . 91 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92Docto

A Survey of Performance Optimization for Mobile Applications

Nowadays there is a mobile application for almost everything a user may think of, ranging from paying bills and gathering information to playing games and watching movies. In order to ensure user satisfaction and success of applications, it is important to provide high performant applications. This is particularly important for resource constraint systems such as mobile devices. Thereby, non-functional performance characteristics, such as energy and memory consumption, play an important role for user satisfaction. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of non-functional performance optimization for Android applications. We collected 155 unique publications, published between 2008 and 2020, that focus on the optimization of non-functional performance of mobile applications. We target our search at four performance characteristics, in particular: responsiveness, launch time, memory and energy consumption. For each performance characteristic, we categorize optimization approaches based on the method used in the corresponding publications. Furthermore, we identify research gaps in the literature for future work