Main Memory in HPC

Runtime Fragility in Main Memory

In this paper we investigate the following problem: Given a database workload (tables and queries), which data layout (row, column or a suitable PAX-layout) should we choose in order to get the best possible performance? We show that this is not an easy problem. We explore careful combinations of various parameters that have an impact on the performance including: (1) the schema, (2) the CPU ar...

Adaptive Main Memory Compression

Computer pioneers correctly predicted that programmers would want unlimited amounts of fast memory. Since fast memory is expensive, an economical solution to that desire is a memory hierarchy organized into several levels. Each level has greater capacity than the preceding but it is less quickly accessible. The goal of the memory hierarchy is to provide a memory system with cost almost as low a...

Main Memory Storage Engines

Processing-in-Memory in ReRAM-based Main Memory

Process in memory (PIM) is a promising solution to address the “memory wall” issue, and most of the proposed PIM architectures integrate logic with memory. However, as long as the computation is done by logic, it needs to access memory for data. In this work, we propose a novel PIM system, utilizing metal-oxide resistive random access memory (ReRAM) as main memory and also for computation. As a...

Robust concurrency control in main-memory DBMS: What main memory giveth, the application taketh away

Modern systems with large main memories and massively parallel processors have inspired many new high-performance OLTP systems [2–4,6], often referred to as main memory DBMS (MMDBMS). These systems leverage spacious main memory to fit the whole working set in DRAM with streamlined, memory-friendly data structures; further, optimizations for multicore and multi-socket hardware allow a much highe...