Analyzing and Improving Memory Access Patterns of Large Irregular Applications on NUMA Machines

Artur Mariano, Matthias Diener, Christian Bischof, Philippe O.A. Navaux

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Improving the memory access behavior of parallel applications is one of the most important challenges in high-performance computing. Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) architectures pose particular challenges in this context: they contain multiple memory controllers and the selection of a controller to serve a page request influences the overall locality and balance of memory accesses, which in turn affect performance. In this paper, we analyze and improve the memory access pattern and overall memory usage of large-scale irregular applications on NUMA machines. We selected HashSieve, a very important algorithm in the context of lattice-based cryptography, as a representative example, due to (1) its extremely irregular memory pattern, (2) large memory requirements and (3) unsuitability to other computer architectures, such as GPUs. We optimize HashSieve with a variety of techniques, focusing both on the algorithm itself as well as the mapping of memory pages to NUMA nodes, achieving a speedup of over 2x.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - 24th Euromicro International Conference on Parallel, Distributed, and Network-Based Processing, PDP 2016
EditorsYiannis Cotronis, Masoud Daneshtalab, George Angelos Papadopoulos
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages382-387
Number of pages6
ISBN (Electronic)9781467387750
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 31 2016
Externally publishedYes
Event24th Euromicro International Conference on Parallel, Distributed, and Network-Based Processing, PDP 2016 - Heraklion, Crete, Greece
Duration: Feb 17 2016Feb 19 2016

Publication series

NameProceedings - 24th Euromicro International Conference on Parallel, Distributed, and Network-Based Processing, PDP 2016

Conference

Conference24th Euromicro International Conference on Parallel, Distributed, and Network-Based Processing, PDP 2016
Country/TerritoryGreece
CityHeraklion, Crete
Period2/17/162/19/16

Keywords

  • irregular applications
  • Memory accesses
  • NUMA

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Software
  • Control and Optimization

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Analyzing and Improving Memory Access Patterns of Large Irregular Applications on NUMA Machines'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this