Reducing Network Latency Using Subpages in a Global Memory Environment

New high-speed networks greatly encourage the use of network memory as a cache for virtual memory and file pages, thereby reducing the need for disk access. Becausepages are the fundamental transfer and access units in remote memory systems, page size is a key performance factor. Recently, page sizes of modern processors have been increasing in order to provide more TLB coverage and amortize disk accesscosts. Unfortunately, for high-speednetworks, small transfers are neededto provide low latency. This trend in page size is thus at odds with the use of network memory on high-speed networks. This paper studies the use of subpages as a means of reducing transfer size and latency in a remote-memory environment. Using trace-driven simulation, we show how and why subpages reduce latency and improve performance of programs using network memory. Our results show that memory-intensive applications execute

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1996
• Where: ASPLOS
• Authors: Hervé A. Jamrozik, Michael J. Feeley, Geoffrey M. Voelker, James Evans II, Anna R. Karlin, Henry M. Levy, Mary K. Vernon
• Keywords: ASPLOS 1996, Network Memory, Page Size, Programming Languages, Remote Memory Systems