DeACT: Architecture-Aware Virtual Memory Support for Fabric Attached Memory Systems

TL;DR

DeACT introduces an architecture-aware virtual memory system optimized for fabric-attached memory in HPC, significantly improving translation speed while maintaining security.

Contribution

It presents DeACT, a novel virtual memory approach tailored for FAM in HPC, outperforming existing methods in speed without sacrificing security.

Findings

Achieves up to 4.59x speedup in address translation

On average 1.8x faster than state-of-the-art methods

Maintains security while improving performance

Abstract

The exponential growth of data has driven technology providers to develop new protocols, such as cache coherent interconnects and memory semantic fabrics, to help users and facilities leverage advances in memory technologies to satisfy these growing memory and storage demands. Using these new protocols, fabric-attached memories (FAM) can be directly attached to a system interconnect and be easily integrated with a variety of processing elements (PEs). Moreover, systems that support FAM can be smoothly upgraded and allow multiple PEs to share the FAM memory pools using well-defined protocols. The sharing of FAM between PEs allows efficient data sharing, improves memory utilization, reduces cost by allowing flexible integration of different PEs and memory modules from several vendors, and makes it easier to upgrade the system. One promising use-case for FAMs is in High-Performance Compute (HPC) systems, where the underutilization of memory is a major challenge. However, adopting FAMs in HPC systems brings new challenges. In addition to cost, flexibility, and efficiency, one particular problem that requires rethinking is virtual memory support for security and performance. To address these challenges, this paper presents decoupled access control and address translation (DeACT), a novel virtual memory implementation that supports HPC systems equipped with FAM. Compared to the state-of-the-art two-level translation approach, DeACT achieves speedup of up to 4.59x (1.8x on average) without compromising security.