Towards optimal scheduling policy for heterogeneous memory architecture in many-core system

Abstract

With the advent of Intels second-generation many-core processor (Knights Landing: KNL), high-bandwidth memory (HBM) with potentially five times more bandwidth than existing dynamic random-access memory has become available as a valuable computing resource for high-performance computing (HPC) applications. Therefore, resource management schemes should now be able to consider existing central processing unit cores, conventional main memory, and this newly available HBM to improve the overall system throughput and user response time. In this paper, we present our profiling mechanism and related scheduling policy that analyzes the resource usage patterns of various HPC workloads. By carefully allocating memory-intensive workloads to HBM in KNL, we show that the overall performance of multiple message passing interface workloads can be improved in terms of the execution time and system utilization. We evaluate and verify the effectiveness of our scheme for optimizing the use of HBM by using NAS Parallel Benchmarks.