Skip to Main Content
 

Global Search Box

 
 
 
 

Files

File List


ucin1014062558.pdf (464.39 KB)

ETD Abstract Container

Abstract Header

A STUDY OF CLUSTER PAGING METHODS TO BOOST VIRTUAL MEMORY PERFORMANCE

RAMAN, VENKATESH
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1014062558

Abstract Details

2002, MS, University of Cincinnati, Engineering : Computer Engineering.
With increase in CPU speed, the performance of many applications has become limited by Virtual Memory (VM). In the case of large out-of-core applications, a portion of their address space is kept in main memory and the rest is stored on a swap disk. The Operating System maintains free pages in RAM and uses the swap disk as an extension of main memory. It dynamically moves inactive pages to disk and maintains working sets of processes in RAM. This activity is called VM paging. Thus, the VM system is limited by disk performance. Disk access speeds are orders of magnitude slower than CPU or main memory. Improving disk Input/Output (I/O) performance is a major challenge because disks have mechanical delays that cannot be reduced. Many researchers have tried to improve disk performance by combining several disk writes into one large operation. Many new I/O architectures such as DCD, RAPID cache, and LFS focus on improving disk write performance. However, VM I/O is read-dominated and generates a substantial number of read requests. The performance of VM cannot be improved by using a large read cache because VM itself is a cache for pages on disk and so an additional cache decreases the amount of memory available to the VM system. Thus, improvements in VM paging activity are required in order to improve the performance of the VM system. In this research, we study a Cluster Paging method that helps boost both read and write performance. It converts several small disk I/O operations into one large request. By using a simple grouping technique, the Cluster Paging method groups pages with good locality into a cluster and stores it on disk. This method uses a cluster as the basic unit of an I/O operation. When a page is read, the entire cluster that has the required page is read into memory. Thus, Cluster Paging prefetches pages into memory before they are accessed. Due to large disk I/O operations and effective prefetching, Cluster Paging can achieve good improvement in VM I/O performance. We study the performance of Cluster Paging using large out-of-core benchmarks. We find that it improves the performance of SPEC 2000 benchmarks by more than 70%. It also improves the performance of NASA Parallel Benchmarks by more than 97%. These results are encouraging and we expect that VM performance could be further improved by using Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) and hardware support
Dr. Yiming Hu (Advisor)
78 p.
virtual memory; page fault; cluster paging; swap cache; operating systems

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • RAMAN, V. (2002). A STUDY OF CLUSTER PAGING METHODS TO BOOST VIRTUAL MEMORY PERFORMANCE [Master's thesis, University of Cincinnati]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1014062558

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • RAMAN, VENKATESH. A STUDY OF CLUSTER PAGING METHODS TO BOOST VIRTUAL MEMORY PERFORMANCE. 2002. University of Cincinnati, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1014062558.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • RAMAN, VENKATESH. "A STUDY OF CLUSTER PAGING METHODS TO BOOST VIRTUAL MEMORY PERFORMANCE." Master's thesis, University of Cincinnati, 2002. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1014062558

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

ucin1014062558
529
© 2002, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by University of Cincinnati and OhioLINK.