Current state-of-the-art systems for hybrid memory management are enriched with machine intelligence. To enable the practical use of Machine Learning (ML), system-level page schedulers focus the ML model training over a small subset of the applications’ memory footprint. At the same time, they use existing lightweight historical information to predict the access behavior of majority of the pages. To maximize application performance improvements, the pages selected for machine learning-based management are identified with elaborate page selection methods. These methods involve the calculation of detailed performance estimates depending on the configuration of the hybrid memory platform. This paper explores the opportunities to reduce such operational overheads of machine learning-based hybrid memory page schedulers via use of visualization techniques to depict memory access patterns, and reveal spatial and temporal correlations among the selected pages, that current methods fail to leverage. We propose an initial version of a visualization pipeline for prioritizing pages for machine learning, that is independent of the hybrid memory configuration. Our approach selects pages whose ML-based management delivers, on average, performance levels within 5% of current solutions, while reducing by 75 × the page selection time. We discuss future directions and make a case that visualization and computer vision methods can unlock new insights and reduce the operational complexity of emerging systems solutions.
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Cronus: Computer Vision-based Machine Intelligent Hybrid Memory Management
Current state-of-the-art resource management systems leverage Machine Learning (ML) methods to enable the efficient use of heterogeneous memory hardware, deployed across emerging computing platforms. While machine intelligence can be effectively used to learn and predict complex data access patterns of modern analytics, the use of ML over the exploded data sizes and memory footprints is prohibitive for its practical system-level integration. For this reason, recent solutions use existing lightweight historical information to predict the access behavior of majority of the application pages, and train ML models over a small page subset. To maximize application performance improvements, the pages selected for machine learning-based management are identified with elaborate page selection methods. These methods involve the calculation of detailed performance estimates depending on the configuration of the hybrid memory platform. This paper aims to reduce such vast operational overheads, that further exacerbate the existing high overheads of using machine intelligence, in return for high performance and efficiency. To this end, we build Cronus, an image-based pipeline for selecting pages for ML-based management. We visualize memory access patterns and reveal spatial and temporal correlations among the selected pages, that current methods fail to leverage. We then use the created images to detect patterns and select page groups for machine learning model deployment. Cronus drastically reduces the operational costs, while preserving the effectiveness of the page selection and achieved performance of machine intelligent hybrid memory management. This work makes a case that visualization and computer vision methods can unlock new insights and reduce the operational complexity of emerging systems solutions.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2016701
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10469908
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 11
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Washington DC USA
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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