Using Bandwidth Throttling to Quantify Application Sensitivity to Heterogeneous Memory

Workshop:MCHPC’21: Workshop on Memory Centric High Performance Computing

Authors: Clément Foyer (French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation (INRIA)) and Brice Goglin (INRIA)

Abstract: Memory management is getting increasingly harder but also primarily important. The plurality of processing- and memory-systems require more care to be put into data placement. To test models, designs and heuristics for data placement, the programmer must be able to access these expensive systems, or find a way to emulate them.

We propose to use the Resource Control features of the Linux kernel and x86 processors to add heterogeneity to homogeneous memory systems to evaluate the impact of different bandwidths on performance. We define a new metric to evaluate the sensibility to bandwidth throttling as an insight of the benefits of using high-bandwidth memory (HBM) for any given application, without the need to access such devices. We evaluated benchmarks with variable sensitivity to bandwidth, and validated our results on two platforms with heterogeneous memory. Although representing an idealized memory, our method gives reliable insight of potential gains when using HBM.

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