Performance characterization of a DRAM-NVM hybrid memory architecture for HPC applications using intel optane DC persistent memory modules Article Swipe

PDF

Related Concepts

Computer science Registered memory Interleaved memory Dram Computer memory Semiconductor memory Non-volatile random-access memory Memory refresh Memory map Embedded system CAS latency Memory management Parallel computing Address space Flat memory model Computer hardware Memory controller

Onkar Patil , Latchesar Ionkov , Jason Lee , Frank Mueller , Michael Lang ·

YOU? · · 2019 · Open Access · · DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3357526.3357541 · OA: W2985656529

Non-volatile, byte-addressable memory (NVM) has been introduced by Intel in the form of NVDIMMs named Intel® Optane™ DC PMM. This memory module has the ability to persist the data stored in it without the need for power. This expands the memory hierarchy into a hybrid memory system due the differences in access latency and memory bandwidth from DRAM, which has been the predominant byte-addressable main memory technology. The Optane DC memory modules have up to 8x the capacity of DDR4 DRAM modules which can expand the byte-address space up to 6 TB per node. Many applications can now scale up the their problem size given such a memory system. We evaluate the capabilities of this DRAM-NVM hybrid memory system and its impact on High Performance Computing (HPC) applications. We characterize the Optane DC in comparison to DDR4 DRAM with a STREAM-like custom benchmark and measure the performance for HPC mini-apps like VPIC, SNAP, LULESH and AMG under different configurations of Optane DC PMMs. We find that Optane-only executions are slower in terms of execution time than DRAM-only and Memory-mode executions by a minimum of 2 to 16% for VPIC and maximum of 6x for LULESH.