HPMMAP: Lightweight Memory Management for Commodity Operating Systems

Abstract

Linux-based operating systems and runtimes (OS/Rs) have emerged as the environments of choice for the majority of modern HPC systems. While Linux-based OS/Rs have advantages such as extensive feature sets as well as developer familiarity, these features come at the cost of additional overhead throughout the system. In contrast to Linux, there is a substantial history of work in the HPC community focused on lightweight OS/R architectures that provide scalable and consistent performance for tightly coupled HPC applications, but lack many of the features offered by commodity OS/Rs. In this paper, we propose to bridge the gap between LWKs and commodity OS/Rs by selectively providing a lightweight memory subsystem for HPC applications in a commodity OS/R environment. Our system HPMMAP provides isolated and low overhead memory performance transparently to HPC applications by bypassing Linux's memory management layer. Our approach is dynamically configurable at runtime, and adds no additional overheads nor requires any resources when not in use. We show that HPMMAP can decrease variance and reduce application runtime by up to 50%.