Should we worry about memory loss?

In recent years the High Performance Computing (HPC) industry has benefited from the development of higher density multi-core processors. With recent chips capable of executing up to 32 tasks in parallel, this rate of growth also shows no sign of slowing. Alongside the development of denser micro-processors has been the considerably more modest rate of improvement in random access memory (RAM) capacities. The effect has been that the available memory-percore has reduced and current projections suggest that this is still set to reduce further. In this paper we present three studies into the use and measurement of memory in parallel applications; our aim is to capture, understand and, if possible, reduce the memoryper-core needed by complete, multi-component applications. First, we present benchmarked memory usage and runtimes of a six scientific benchmarks, which represent algorithms that are common to a host of production-grade codes. Memory usage of each benchmark is measured and ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: SIGMETRICS
• Authors: O. Perks, Simon D. Hammond, S. J. Pennycook, Stephen A. Jarvis
• Keywords: Density Multi-core Processors, Hardware, Memory Usage, Random Access Memory, SIGMETRICS 2011