COMPAT: A Compression Framework with Fine-Grain and Object-Level Compression Units

Journal article, 2026

Memory compression techniques can meet the demands on memory capacity for emerging workloads at a low cost. Unfortunately, proposed memory compression frameworks show limited memory-expansion capability for two major reasons: (i) They limit the number of compression unit sizes and (ii) the fixed block size used is typically misaligned with the size of object data structures used in many applications.We propose COMPAT, a technique that enables fine-grain compression unit sizes without the overhead caused by altering the compression unit size. COMPAT also supports a novel object-based compression framework with a load-store unit design that can infer the object structure with only minor changes to the memory system and no changes to the instruction-set architecture as in previous work. In general, COMPAT offers an improvement in compression ratio and performance by 30% and 20%, respectively.