Data Direct I/O Characterization for Future I/O System Exploration

I/O performance plays a critical role in the overall performance of modern servers. The emergence of ultra high-speed I/O devices makes the data movement between processors, main memory, and devices a major performance bottleneck. Conventionally, the main memory is used as an intermediate buffer between the processor and I/O devices and I/O devices cannot directly access processor side caches. Data Direct I/O (DDIO) technology aims to reduce the memory bandwidth utilization by enabling the I/O devices to leverage Last Level Cache (LLC) as the intermediate buffer. Our experimental results show that DDIO can completely eliminate memory bandwidth utilization while running network-or storage-intensive applications. However, when modeling the I/O subsystem using architectural simulators, DDIO is often ignored, which can result in inaccurate assessments about the I/O and memory sub system of emerging and future large-scale computer systems. In this paper, we provide a detailed background on DDIO technology in Intel server processors. Then we present our cycle-accurate I/O subsystem model in gem5 simulator that can be configured to model DDIO. We verify our model against baseline gem5 and validate it by comparing its results against a physical computer system.