Performance, Energy and NVM Lifetime-Aware Data Structure Refinement and Placement for Heterogeneous Memory Systems

The need for increased memory capacity, which is also affordable and sustainable, leads to the adoption of heterogeneous memory hierarchies, combining DRAM and NVM technologies. This work proposes a memory management methodology that relies on multi-objective optimization in terms of performance, energy consumption and impact on NVM’s lifetime, for applications deployed on heterogeneous (i.e. DRAM/NVM) memory systems. The evaluation of the methodology was performed both on emulated and real DRAM/NVM hardware for different applications and data placement algorithms. The experimental results show 58.7% lower execution time, 48.3% less energy consumption and 72.6% less NVM write operations compared to the results obtained by the initial versions of the applications. Thorough evaluation shows that the methodology is flexible and scalable, as it can integrate different data placement algorithms and NVM technologies and requires reasonable exploration time.