Software-managed energy-efficient hybrid DRAM/NVM main memory

Abstract

This paper evaluates the viability of user-level software management of a hybrid DRAM/NVM main memory system. We propose an operating system (OS) and programming interface to place data from within the user application. We present a profiling tool to help programmers decide on the placement of application data in hybrid memory systems. Cycle-accurate simulation of modified applications confirms that our approach is more energy-efficient than state-of-the-art hardware or OS approaches at equivalent performance. Moreover, our results are validated on several candidate NVM technologies and a wide set of 14 benchmarks. The key observation behind this work is that, for the workloads we evaluated, application objects are too short-lived to motivate migration. Utilizing this property significantly reduces the hardware complexity of hybrid memory systems.