Memory access behavior analysis of NUMA-based shared memory programs

摘要

Shared memory applications running transparently on top of NUMA architectures often face severe performance problems due to bad data locality and excessive remote memory accesses. Optimizations with respect to data locality are therefore necessary, but require a fundamental understanding of an application's memory access behavior. The information necessary for this cannot be obtained using simple code instrumentation due to the implicit nature of the communication handled by the NUMA hardware the large amount of traffic produced at runtime, and the fine access granularity in shared memory codes.