FlatPack: Flexible Compaction of Compressed Memory

Paper in proceeding, 2022

The capacity and bandwidth of main memory is an increasingly important factor in computer system performance. Memory compression and compaction have been combined to increase effective capacity and reduce costly page faults. However, existing systems typically maintain compaction at the expense of bandwidth. One major cause of extra traffic in such systems is page overflows, which occur when data compressibility degrades and compressed pages must be reorganized. This paper introduces FlatPack, a novel approach to memory compaction which is able to mitigate this overhead by reorganizing compressed data dynamically with less data movement. Reorganization is carried out by an addition to the memory controller, without intervention from software. FlatPack is able to maintain memory capacity competitive with current state-of-the-art memory compression designs, while reducing mean memory traffic by up to 67%. This yields average improvements in performance and total system energy consumption over existing memory compression solutions of 31-46% and 11-25%, respectively. In total, FlatPack improves on baseline performance and energy consumption by 108% and 40%, respectively, in a single-core system, and 83% and 23%, respectively, in a multi-core system.