Effect of CC-NUMA Memory Management on the Performance of Interconnection Networks

CC-NUMA architectures have become extremely popular by providing fast and transparent access to data with multiple levels of caches and local and remote memories. However, the bottleneck remains in the remote memory access that has latencies several magnitudes higher than the cache access. Designing effective data allocation policies that provide local memory data access and limit the need to access remote memories remains a challenge. We study three different static memory management policies, namely buddy, round-robin and first-touch, and analyze their impact on data locality and application memory access patterns. Interconnection network performance depends heavily on the memory access patterns of the workload. Using these realistic memory management policies, we reevaluate the performance of a multistage interconnection network (MIN). Limited earlier work in the area of CC-NUMA memory management has assumed constant network delays and thus ignored the impact of switch design on per..