1 STABLE PERFORMANCE FOR CC-NUMA USING FIRST TOUCH PAGE PLACEMENT AND REACTIVE PROXIES

Abstract: A key problem for shared-memory systems is unpredictable perfor-mance. A critical in uence on performance is page placement: a poor choice of home node can severely degrade application performance because of the in-creased latency of accessing remote rather than local data. Two approaches to page placement are the simple policies \ rst-touch " and \round-robin", but nei-ther of these policies suits all applications. We examine the advantages of each strategy, the problems that can result from a poor choice of placement policy, and how these problems can be alleviated by using proxies. Proxies route re-mote read requests via intermediate nodes, where combining is used to reduce contention at the home node. Our simulation results indicate that by using reactive proxies with rst-touch page placement, performance is always better than using either page placement policy without proxies. These results suggest that the application programmer can obtain stable performance without know-ing the underlying implementation of cc-numa, and can avoid time-consuming performance tuning