Memory Controller Design Under Cloud Workloads

This work studies the behavior of state-of-the-art memory controller designs when executing scale-out workloads. It considers memory scheduling techniques, memory page management policies, the number of memory channels, and the address mapping scheme used. Experimental measurements demonstrate: 1)~Several recently proposed memory scheduling policies are not a good match for these scale-out workloads. 2)~The relatively simple First-Ready-First-Come-First-Served (FR-FCFS) policy performs consistently better, and 3)~for most of the studied workloads, the even simpler First-Come-First-Served scheduling policy is within 1\% of FR-FCFS. 4)~Increasing the number of memory channels offers negligible performance benefits, e.g., performance improves by 1.7\% on average for 4-channels vs. 1-channel. 5)~77\%-90\% of DRAM rows activations are accessed only once before closure. These observation can guide future development and optimization of memory controllers for scale-out workloads.

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