RHPM: Using Relative Hotness to Guide Page Migration for Hybrid Memory Systems

Modern computing systems and data-intensive applications are eager for larger and faster memory. Building hybrid memory systems with different memory technologies has become a dominant trend to satisfy these demands. For hybrid memory systems, page migration schemes that dynamically migrate frequently accessed hot pages into faster memory are crucial for improving performance. However, existing migration schemes are either too aggressive, resulting in unnecessary extra traffic, or too conservative to quickly adapt to changes in access patterns. Besides, the extra latency introduced by querying metadata is often ignored or handled in an unscalable manner. In this article, we propose a relative hotness page migration (RHPM) strategy, which discovers hot pages in a set of pages by competing with each other rather than comparing with a threshold. The migration is performed only when a new page wins the competition. To overlap latency due to access metadata, RHPM fetches metadata and data in parallel. In addition, it enables a small metadata buffer to speed up metadata access. Compared to the state-of-the-art scheme, RHPM requires only 1/512 of the on-chip capacity, significantly reducing on-chip hardware overhead. Evaluation of RHPM with simulations of 25 workloads shows that RHPM outperforms the state-of-the-art scheme by an average of 13.34% in performance and saves 44.19% on energy, demonstrating better resilience to changes in access patterns.