Virtual hierarchies to support server consolidation

  • Authors:
  • Michael R. Marty;Mark D. Hill

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI;University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 34th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Server consolidation is becoming an increasingly populartechnique to manage and utilize systems. This paper develops CMPmemory systems for server consolidation where most sharing occurswithin Virtual Machines (VMs). Our memory systems maximize sharedmemory accesses serviced within a VM, minimize interference amongseparate VMs, facilitate dynamic reassignment of VMs to processorsand memory, and support content-based page sharing among VMs. Webegin with a tiled architecture where each of 64 tiles contains aprocessor, private L1 caches, and an L2 bank. First, we reveal whysingle-level directory designs fail to meet workload consolidationgoals. Second, we develop the paper's central idea of imposing atwo-level virtual (or logical) coherence hierarchy on a physicallyflat CMP that harmonizes with VM assignment. Third, we show thatthe best of our two virtual hierarchy (VH) variants performs 12-58%better than the best alternative flat directory protocol whenconsolidating Apache, OLTP, and Zeus commel workloads on oursimulated 64-core CMP.