PALLOC: DRAM bank-aware memory allocator for performance isolation on multicore platforms

DRAM consists of multiple resources called banks that can be accessed in parallel and independently maintain state information. In Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) multicore platforms, banks are typically shared among all cores, even though programs running on the cores do not share memory space. In this situation, memory performance is highly unpredictable due to contention in the shared banks. In this paper, we propose PALLOC, a DRAM bank-aware memory allocator which exploits the page-based virtual memory system to allocate memory pages of each application to specific banks. With PALLOC, we can dynamically partition banks to avoid bank sharing among cores, thereby improving isolation on COTS multicore platforms without requiring any special hardware support. We performed an extensive set of experiments to investigate the performance impact of DRAM bank partitioning on two COTS multicore platforms with a set of synthetic and SPEC2006 benchmarks. Our evaluation results demonstrate that DRAM bank partitioning significantly improves isolation and real-time performance.