Memory MISER: Improving Main Memory Energy Efficiency in Servers

  • Authors:
  • Matthew E. Tolentino;Joseph Turner;Kirk W. Cameron

  • Affiliations:
  • Virginia Polytechnic and State University, Blacksburg;Virginia Polytechnic and State University, Blacksburg;Virginia Polytechnic and State University, Blacksburg

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Computers
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Main memory power in volume and mid-range servers is growing as a fraction of total system power. The resulting energy consumption increases system cost and the heat produced reduces reliability. Emergent memory technology will provide systems with the ability to dynamically turn-on (online) and turn-off (offline) memory devices at runtime. This technology, coupled with slack in memory demand, offers the potential for significant energy savings in servers. However, to gain general acceptance in the server community, power-aware techniques must maintain performance and scale to thousands of memory devices. We propose a Memory Management Infra-Structure for Energy Reduction (Memory MISER) that is transparent, performance-neutral, and scalable. Memory MISER provides: 1) a prototype Linux kernel that manages memory at device granularity, and 2) a userspace daemon that tracks systemic memory demand and implements energy- and performance-constrained device controller policies. Experiments on an 8-node cluster of servers show our Memory MISER conserves memory energy up to 56.8% with no performance degradation for scientific codes that utilized the entire cluster. For multi-user workloads, we achieved memory energy savings of up to 67.94% with no performance degradation. Normalizing to total system energy consumption, our power-aware memory approach reduced energy between 18.81% and 39.02%.