Elastic cuckoo page tables: Rethinking virtual memory translation for parallelism

D Skarlatos, A Kokolis, T Xu, J Torrellas - Proceedings of the Twenty …, 2020 - dl.acm.org
Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth International Conference on Architectural …, 2020dl.acm.org
The unprecedented growth in the memory needs of emerging memory-intensive workloads
has made virtual memory translation a major performance bottleneck. To address this
problem, this paper introduces Elastic Cuckoo Page Tables, a novel page table design that
transforms the sequential pointer-chasing operation used by conventional multi-level radix
page tables into fully-parallel look-ups. The resulting design harvests, for the first time, the
benefits of memory level parallelism for address translation. Elastic cuckoo page tables use …
The unprecedented growth in the memory needs of emerging memory-intensive workloads has made virtual memory translation a major performance bottleneck. To address this problem, this paper introduces Elastic Cuckoo Page Tables, a novel page table design that transforms the sequential pointer-chasing operation used by conventional multi-level radix page tables into fully-parallel look-ups. The resulting design harvests, for the first time, the benefits of memory level parallelism for address translation. Elastic cuckoo page tables use Elastic Cuckoo Hashing, a novel extension of cuckoo hashing that supports efficient page table resizing. Elastic cuckoo page tables efficiently resolve hash collisions, provide process-private page tables, support multiple page sizes and page sharing among processes, and dynamically adapt page table sizes to meet application requirements. We evaluate elastic cuckoo page tables with full-system simulations of an 8-core processor using a set of graph analytics, bioinformatics, HPC, and system workloads. Elastic cuckoo page tables reduce the address translation overhead by an average of 41% over conventional radix page tables. The result is a 3-18% speed-up in application execution.
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