A Case for Granularity Aware Page Migration

Memory is becoming increasingly heterogeneous with the emergence of disparate memory technologies ranging from non-volatile memories like PCM, STT-RAM, and memristors to 3D-stacked memories like HBM. In such systems, data is of ten migrated across memory regions backed by different technologies for better overall performance. An effective migration mechanism is a prerequisite in such systems. Prior works on OS-directed page migration have focused on what data to migrate and/or on when to migrate. In this work, we demonstrate the need to investigate another dimension -- how much to migrate. Specifically, we show that the amount of data migrated in a single migration operation (called "migration granularity") is vital to the overall performance. Through analysis on real hardware, we further show that different applications benefit from different migration granularities, owing to their distinct memory access characteristics. Since this preferred migration granularity may not be known a priori, we propose a novel scheme to infer this for any given application at runtime. When implemented in the Linux OS, running on a current hardware, the performance improved by up to 36% over a baseline with a fixed migration granularity.