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.

Memory Compression

Compression

Memory Systems

Author

Albin Eldstål-Ahrens

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Computer Engineering (Chalmers)

Angelos Arelakis

ZeroPoint Technologies AB

Ioannis Sourdis

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Computer Engineering (Chalmers)

Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques - Conference Proceedings, PACT

1089795X (ISSN)

96-108
9781450398688 (ISBN)

Proceedings of the International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques, PACT '22
Chicago, USA,

Principer för beräknande minnesenheter (PRIDE)

Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research (SSF) (DnrCHI19-0048), 2021-01-01 -- 2025-12-31.

Areas of Advance

Information and Communication Technology

Subject Categories

Computer Systems

DOI

10.1145/3559009.3569653

More information

Latest update

2/13/2023