Workload Behavior Driven Memory Subsystem Design for Hyperscale

Hyperscalars run services across a large fleet of servers, serving billions of users worldwide. These services, however, behave differently than commonly available benchmark suites, resulting in server architectures that are not optimized for cloud workloads. With datacenters becoming a primary server processor market, optimizing server processors for cloud workloads by better understanding their behavior has become crucial. To address this, in this paper, we present MemProf, a memory profiler that profiles the three major reasons for stalls in cloud workloads: code-fetch, memory bandwidth, and memory latency. We use MemProf to understand the behavior of cloud workloads and propose and evaluate micro-architectural and memory system design improvements that help cloud workloads' performance. MemProf's code analysis shows that cloud workloads execute the same code across CPU cores. Using this, we propose shared micro-architectural structures--a shared L2 I-TLB and a shared L2 cache. Next, to help with memory bandwidth stalls, using workloads' memory bandwidth distribution, we find that only a few pages contribute to most of the system bandwidth. We use this finding to evaluate a new high-bandwidth, small-capacity memory tier and show that it performs 1.46x better than the current baseline configuration. Finally, we look into ways to improve memory latency for cloud workloads. Profiling using MemProf reveals that L2 hardware prefetchers, a common solution to reduce memory latency, have very low coverage and consume a significant amount of memory bandwidth. To help improve hardware prefetcher performance, we built a memory tracing tool to collect and validate production memory access traces

Snapshot: Fast, Userspace Crash Consistency for CXL and PM Using msync

Crash consistency using persistent memory programming libraries requires programmers to use complex transactions and manual annotations. In contrast, the failure-atomic msync() (FAMS) interface is much simpler as it transparently tracks updates and guarantees that modified data is atomically durable on a call to the failure-atomic variant of msync(). However, FAMS suffers from several drawbacks, like the overhead of msync() and the write amplification from page-level dirty data tracking. To address these drawbacks while preserving the advantages of FAMS, we propose Snapshot, an efficient userspace implementation of FAMS. Snapshot uses compiler-based annotation to transparently track updates in userspace and syncs them with the backing byte-addressable storage copy on a call to msync(). By keeping a copy of application data in DRAM, Snapshot improves access latency. Moreover, with automatic tracking and syncing changes only on a call to msync(), Snapshot provides crash-consistency guarantees, unlike the POSIX msync() system call. For a KV-Store backed by Intel Optane running the YCSB benchmark, Snapshot achieves at least 1.2$\times$ speedup over PMDK while significantly outperforming conventional (non-crash-consistent) msync(). On an emulated CXL memory semantic SSD, Snapshot outperforms PMDK by up to 10.9$\times$ on all but one YCSB workload, where PMDK is 1.2$\times$ faster than Snapshot. Further, Kyoto Cabinet commits perform up to 8.0$\times$ faster with Snapshot than its built-in, msync()-based crash-consistency mechanism.Comment: A shorter version of this paper appeared in the Proceedings of ICCD 202