Abstract and subjects
Nonuniform Memory Access (NUMA) will likely continue to be the chief abstraction used to expose heterogeneous memory. One major problem with using NUMA in this way is, the assignment of memory to devices, mediated by the hardware and Linux OS, is only resolved to page granularity. Oat is, pages, not allocations, are explicitly assigned to memory devices. This is particularly troublesome if one wants to migrate data between devices: since only pages can be migrated, other data allocated on the same pages will be migrated as well, and it isn't easy to tell what data will be swept along to the target device. We propose a solution to this problem based on repurposing arena-based heap management to keep locality among related data structures that are used together, and discuss our work on such a heap manager.