PALLOC: DRAM Bank-Aware Memory Allocator for Performance Isolation on Multicore Platforms

PALLOC: DRAM Bank-Aware Memory Allocator for Performance Isolation on Multicore Platforms

Heechul Yuny, Renato Mancusoz, Zheng-Pei Wu?, Rodolfo Pellizzoni?

University of Kansas, USA. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. University of Waterloo, Canada

Abstract DRAM consists of multiple resources called banksthat can be accessed in parallel and independently maintain state information. In Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) multicore platforms, banks are typically shared among all cores, even though programs running on the cores do not share memory space. In this situation, memory performance is highly unpre dictable due to contention in the shared banks.

In this paper, we propose PALLOC, a DRAM bank-aware memory allocator which exploits the page-based virtual memory system to allocate memory pages of each application to specific banks. With PALLOC, we can dynamically partition banks to avoid bank sharing among cores, thereby improving isolation on COTS multicore platforms without requiring any special hardware support.