Project

Reducing the Cost of Accessing Memory on NUMA Systems

Principal Investigator

Assistant Professor Sasha Federova

Simon Fraser University

Oracle Fellowship Recipient

Fabien Gaud, Fabien Gaud, Justin Funston

Oracle Principal Investigator

Jonathan Chew
Ravi Thammaiah
Sumanta Chatterjee

Summary

NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) systems are becoming the de facto standard for high-performance servers. These systems look like “islands” of cores and memories, called nodes, connected by a high-speed interconnect. As applications run, the system moves data from one node to another across the interconnect. The interconnect and node-local memory controllers may become congested, leading to slowdown and energy loss of as much 2-3X! Oracle DB is significantly affected by this problem. Our goal is to investigate data placement algorithms implementable in the operating system to address congestion and prevent loss of performance.