Catalyst: GPU-assisted rapid memory deduplication in virtualization environments
Content based page sharing techniques improve memory efficiency in virtualized systems by identifying and merging identical pages. Kernel Same-page merging (KSM), a Linux kernel utility for page sharing, sequentially scans memory pages of virtual machines to deduplicate pages. Sequential scanning of pages has several undesirable side effects—wasted CPU cycles when no sharing opportunities exist, and rate of discovery of sharing being dependent on the scanning rate and corresponding CPU availability. In this work, we exploit presence of GPUs on modern systems to enable rapid memory sharing through targeted scanning of pages. Our solution, Catalyst, works in two phases, the first where pages of virtual machines are processed by the GPU to identify likely pages for sharing and a second phase that performs page-level similarity checks on a targeted set of shareable pages. Opportunistic usage of the GPU to produce sharing hints enables rapid and low-overhead deduplication, and sharing of memory pages in virtualization environments. We evaluate Catalyst against various benchmarks and workloads to demonstrate that Catalyst can achieve higher memory sharing in lesser time compared to different scan rate configurations of KSM, at lower or comparable compute costs.
Presentation Slides (Garg_final_presentation.pdf) | 969KiB |
Sat 8 AprDisplayed time zone: Azores change
14:00 - 15:30 | |||
14:00 30mTalk | Catalyst: GPU-assisted rapid memory deduplication in virtualization environments Session 2 Anshuj Garg Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, Debadatta Mishra Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, Purushottam Kulkarni Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay File Attached | ||
14:30 30mTalk | Just-In-Time GPU Compilation for Interpreted Languages with Partial Evaluation Session 2 Juan Fumero The University of Edinburgh, Michel Steuwer The University of Edinburgh, Lukas Stadler Oracle Labs, Austria, Christophe Dubach University of Edinburgh Link to publication | ||
15:00 30mTalk | Heterogeneous Managed Runtime Systems: A Computer Vision Case Study Session 2 Christos Kotselidis The University of Manchester, James Clarkson The University of Manchester, Andrey Rodchenko The University of Manchester, Andrew Nisbet The University of Manchester, John Mawer The University of Manchester, Mikel Luján File Attached |