Summary:

Far-memory techniques that enable applications to use remote memory and are increasingly appealing in modern data centers, supporting applications’ large memory footprint and improving machines’ resource utilization. In this episode Haoran Ma tells us about the problems with current far-memory techniques and how they focus on OS-level optimizations and are agnostic to managed runtimes and garbage collections (GC) underneath applications written in high-level languages. Owing to different object-access patterns from applications, GC can severely interfere with existing far-memory techniques, breaking remote memory prefetching algorithms and causing severe local-memory misses. To address this Haoran and his colleagues developed MemLiner, a runtime technique that improves the performance of far-memory systems by “lining up” memory accesses from the application and the GC so that they follow similar memory access paths, thereby (1) reducing the local-memory working set and (2) improving remote-memory prefetching through simplified memory access patterns. Listen to the episode to learn more!

Links:

• OSDI'22 MemLiner paper
• OSDI'22 Presentation
• Haoran's website

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