FlexHM: A Practical System for Heterogeneous Memory with Flexible and Efficient Performance Optimizations

Abstract

With the rapid development of cloud computing, numerous cloud services, containers, and virtual machines have been bringing tremendous demands on high-performance memory resources to modern data centers. Heterogeneous memory, especially the newly released Optane memory, offer appropriate alternatives against DRAM in clouds with the advantages of larger capacity, lower purchase cost, and promising performance. However, cloud services suffer serious implementation inconvenience and performance degradation when using hybrid DRAM and Optane memory. This article proposes FlexHM, a practical system to manage transparent heterogeneous memory resources and flexibly optimize memory access performance for all VMs, containers, and native applications. We present an open-source prototype of FlexHM in Linux with several main contributions. First, FlexHM raises a novel two-level NUMA design to manage DRAM and Optane memory as transparent main memory resources. Second, FlexHM provides flexible and efficient memory management, helping optimize memory access performance or save purchase costs of memory resources for differential cloud services with customized management strategies. Finally, the evaluations show that cloud workloads using 50% Optane slow memory on FlexHM can achieve up to 93% of the performance when using all-DRAM, and FlexHM provides up to 5.8× improvement over the previous heterogeneous memory system solution when workloads use the same ratio of DRAM and Optane memory.