Experimental comparison of memory management policies for NUMA multiprocessors

Abstract

Nonuniformity of memory accessis an almost inevitable feature of the memory architecture in shared memory multiprocessor designs that can scale to large numbers of processors. One implication of NUMA architectures is that the placement and movement of code and data are crucial to performance. As memory architectures become more complex and the nonuniformity becomes less well hidden, system software must assume a larger role in providing memory management support for the programmer. This paper investigates the role of the operating system.