Memory Expansion Technology (MXT): Software support and performance

Abstract

MemoryExpansion Technology (MXT): Software support and performance A novel memory subsystem called Memory Expansion Technology (MXT) has been built for fast hardware compression of main-memory content. This allows a memory expansion to present a "real" memory larger than the physically available memory. This paper provides an overview of the memorycompression architecture, its OS support under Linux and Windows ® , and an analysis of the performance impact of memory compression. Results show that the hardware compression of main memory has a negligible penalty compared to an uncompressed main memory, and for memory-starved applications it increases performance significantly. We also show that the memory content of an application can usually be compressed by a factor of 2.

Toggle-Aware Compression for GPUs

“…In this work, we examine the use of six compression algorithms for bandwidth compression in GPU applications, taking into account bit toggles: (i) FPC (Frequent Pattern Compression) [2]; (ii) BDI (BaseDelta-Immediate Compression) [18]; (iii) BDI+FPC (combined FPC and BDI) [17]; (iv) LZSS (Lempel-Ziv compression) [29], [1]; (v) Fibonacci (a graphics-specific compression algorithm) [19]; and (vi) C-Pack [7]. To ensure our conclusions are more practically applicable, we analyze real GPU applications with actual data sets provided by a major GPU vendor.…”

Memory Expansion Technology (MXT): Competitive impact

“…Extensive evidence exists, and is discussed elsewhere, that MXT can essentially double the capacity of an installed memory to hold instructions and data [2,3,4,13]. It has also been extensively verified that the performance of the MXT memory doubled system is essentially identical to that of a stock system with twice the installed memory of the MXT system [3,4].…”

“…Memory Expansion Technology, (MXT) has been discussed in a number of forums [1,2,3,4,5,6,13]. It is a hardware implemented means for software transparent on the fly compression of the content of a computer systems main memory.…”

“…It is a hardware implemented means for software transparent on the fly compression of the content of a computer systems main memory. For a very broad set of workloads it provides 2:1 or better compression [3,4]. This ability to compress and store data in a fewer number of bytes effectively doubles the apparent capacity of memory at minimal cost.…”

Improving Web Server Performance Through Main Memory Compression

“…In order to evaluate the benefits of our compression approach we have replaced the content of the original working set with the content of some files from the Silesia corpus [18], which is intended to represent the current content of common diskfiles. This dataset has an average compression factor of 41% with the LZO compression algorithm that is between the ranges that some papers forecast for in memory data [19], [13] and [2]. We have chosen the LZO algorithm because it has a good compression ratio with file backed data and is one of the fastest available compressors.…”