About this Computer Science article

Reducing Network Latency Using Subpages in a Global Memory Environment by Hervé A. Jamrozik; Michael J. Feeley; Geoffrey M. Voelker; James Evans; Anna R. Karlin; Henry M. Levy; Mary K. Vernon is a Computer Science article available to read on EtoBox.

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. Because pages 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 access costs. Unfortunately, for high-speed networks, __small__ transfers are needed to 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 up to 1.8 times faster when executing with 1K-byte subpages, when compared to the same applications using full 8K-byte pages in the global memory system. Those same applications using 1K-byte subpages execute up to 4 times faster than they would using the disk for backing store.

Author

Hervé A. Jamrozik; Michael J. Feeley; Geoffrey M. Voelker; James Evans; Anna R. Karlin; Henry M. Levy; Mary K. Vernon

Publisher

ACM

Published

1996

Language

EN

Field

Computer Science (Physical Sciences)