Qualifying Exam

Qualifying Exam Exploring Memory Management and Virtualization Optimization Opportunities in Modern Tiered Memory Systems
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Speaker: Linfeng He

Bio

Location : CoRE 305

Committee: 

Associate Professor Sudarsun Kannan

Assistant Professor Minesh Patel

Professor Santosh Nagarakatte

Associate Professor Mridul Aanjaneya

 Professor Kevin Skadron (external)

Event Type: Qualifying Exam

Abstract: The growing memory demands of modern data-intensive applications have pushed systems toward tiered memory architectures, as scaling local DRAM alone is increasingly limited by capacity, cost, and platform constraints. In this context, CXL enables large-scale memory expansion, but accessing CXL-attached memory via a host-centric solution can incur significant latency, underutilized bandwidth, and energy overhead. To better utilize expanded memory, near-CXL processing offers a promising alternative by placing lightweight cores close to CXL memory, allowing data-intensive computation to run near where data resides. However, existing operating-system mechanisms for virtualization, scheduling, and data movement are primarily designed for conventional host-centric execution, and can become inefficient in near-CXL processing, where lightweight cores operate under different compute capabilities and memory access characteristics. This research investigates near-CXL processing as a concrete use case for rethinking OS support in modern tiered memory systems. We study how memory management and virtualization can be redesigned to reduce address translation overhead, enable cooperative execution between host and near-CXL cores, and more efficiently manage data movement. Through this work, we aim to identify general OS principles and mechanisms for future tiered and disaggregated memory architectures, where computation and memory are increasingly distributed across heterogeneous resources.

Organization: 

Contact  Associate Professor Sudarsun Kannan

Zoom Link: https://rutgers.zoom.us/j/99484534509?pwd=PQJDOxZALzCo1nWB918eEhkTUnJ83L.1