Optimizing operating system performance for CC-NUMA architectures

摘要

The CC-NUMA (cache-coherent non-uniform memory access) architecture is an attractive solution to scalable servers. The performance of a CC-NUMA system heavily depends on the number of accesses to remote memory through an interconnection network. To reduce the number of remote accesses, an operating system needs to exploit the potential locality of the architecture. This paper describes the design and implementation of a UNIX-based operating system supporting the CC-NUMA architecture. The operating system implements various enhancements by revising kernel algorithms and data structures. This paper also analyzes the performance of the enhanced operating system by running commercial benchmarks on a real CC-NUMA system. The performance analysis shows that the operating system can achieve improved performance and scalability for CC-NUMA by implementing kernel data striping, localization and load balancing.