Dynamic page placement to improve locality in CC-NUMA multiprocessors for TPC-C

Abstract

The use of CC-NUMA multiprocessors complicates the placement of physical memory pages. Memory closest to a processor provides the best access time, but optimal memory page placement is a difficult problem with process movement, multiple processes requiring access to the same physical memory page, and application behavior changing over execution time. We use dynamic page placement to move memory pages where needed for the database benchmark TPC-C executing on a four node CC-NUMA multiprocessor. Dynamic page placement achieves local memory accesses up to 73% of the time instead of the static page placement results of 34% locality achieved with first touch and 25% with round robin. This can result in a 17% improvement in performance.