Towards an Adaptable Systems Architecture for Memory Tiering at Warehouse-Scale
Padmapriya Duraisamy, Wei Xü, Scott Hare, Ravi Rajwar, David Culler, Zhiyi Xu, Jianing Fan, Christopher Kennelly, Bill McCloskey, Danijela Mijailovic, Brian Morris, Chiranjit Mukherjee, Jingliang Ren, Greg Thelen, Paul Turner, Carlos Villavieja, Parthasarathy Ranganathan, Amin Vahdat
Abstract
Fast DRAM increasingly dominates infrastructure spend in large scale computing environments and this trend will likely worsen without an architectural shift. The cost of deployed memory can be reduced by replacing part of the conventional DRAM with lower cost albeit slower memory media, thus creating a tiered memory system where both tiers are directly addressable and cached. But, this poses numerous challenges in a highly multi-tenant warehouse-scale computing setting. The diversity and scale of its applications motivates an application-transparent solution in the general case, adaptable to specific workload demands.