ViPZonE: Hardware Power Variability-Aware Virtual Memory Management for Energy Savings

Hardware variability is predicted to increase dramatically over the coming years as a consequence of continued technology scaling. In this paper, we apply the Underdesigned and Opportunistic Computing (UnO) paradigm by exposing system-level power variability to software to improve energy efficiency....

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on computers Vol. 64; no. 5; pp. 1483 - 1496
Main Authors: Gottscho, Mark, Bathen, Luis A. D., Dutt, Nikil, Nicolau, Alex, Gupta, Puneet
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: New York IEEE 01.05.2015
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subjects:
allocation/deallocation strategies
DRAM
energy-aware systems
Hardware
Kernel
Linux
main memory
Memory management
operating systems
Random access memory
Resource management
variability
main memory
operating systems
allocation/deallocation strategies
DRAM
variability
energy-aware systems
ISSN:0018-9340, 1557-9956
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Hardware variability is predicted to increase dramatically over the coming years as a consequence of continued technology scaling. In this paper, we apply the Underdesigned and Opportunistic Computing (UnO) paradigm by exposing system-level power variability to software to improve energy efficiency. We present ViPZonE, a memory management solution in conjunction with application annotations that opportunistically performs memory allocations to reduce DRAM energy. ViPZonE's components consist of a physical address space with DIMM-aware zones, a modified page allocation routine, and a new virtual memory system call for dynamic allocations from userspace. We implemented ViPZonE in the Linux kernel with GLIBC API support, running on a real x86-64 testbed with significant access power variation in its DDR3 DIMMs. We demonstrate that on our testbed, ViPZonE can save up to 27.80 percent memory energy, with no more than 4.80 percent performance degradation across a set of PARSEC benchmarks tested with respect to the baseline Linux software. Furthermore, through a hypothetical "what-if" extension, we predict that in future non-volatile memory systems which consume almost no idle power, ViPZonE could yield even greater benefits, demonstrating the ability to exploit memory hardware variability through opportunistic software.
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ISSN:0018-9340
1557-9956
DOI:10.1109/TC.2014.2329675