Hypart: a hybrid technique for practical memory bandwidth partitioning on commodity servers

Abstract

Memory bandwidth is a highly performance-critical shared resource on modern computer systems. To prevent the contention on memory bandwidth among the collocated workloads, prior works have investigated memory bandwidth partitioning techniques. Despite the extensive prior works, it still remains unexplored to characterize the widely-used memory bandwidth partitioning techniques based on various metrics and investigate a hybrid technique that employs multiple memory bandwidth partitioning techniques to improve the overall efficiency.

To bridge this gap, we first present the in-depth characterization of the three widely-used memory bandwidth partitioning techniques (i.e., thread packing, clock modulation, and Intel's Memory Bandwidth Allocation (MBA)) in terms of dynamic range, granularity, and efficiency. Guided by the characterization results, we propose HyPart, a hybrid technique for practical memory bandwidth partitioning on commodity servers. HyPart composes the three memory bandwidth partitioning techniques in a constructive manner and dynamically performs optimizations based on the application characteristics without requiring any offline profiling. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of HyPart in that it provides a wider dynamic range and finer-grain control of memory bandwidth and achieves significantly higher efficiency than the conventional memory bandwidth partitioning techniques.