Re: [RFC v2 0/5] surface heterogeneous memory performance information

Dave Hansen
2017-07-06T23:30:16Z

On 07/06/2017 04:08 PM, Jerome Glisse wrote:
>> So, for applications that need to differentiate between memory ranges based
>> on their performance, what option would work best for you? Is the local
>> (initiator,target) performance provided by patch 5 enough, or do you
>> require performance information for all possible (initiator,target)
>> pairings?
>
> Am i right in assuming that HBM or any faster memory will be relatively small
> (1GB - 8GB maybe 16GB ?) and of fix amount (ie size will depend on the exact
> CPU model you have) ?

For HBM, that's certainly consistent with the Xeon Phi MCDRAM.

But, please remember that this patch set is for fast memory *and* slow
memory (vs. plain DRAM).

> If so i am wondering if we should not restrict NUMA placement policy for such
> node to vma only. Forbid any policy that would prefer those node globally at
> thread/process level. This would avoid wide thread policy to exhaust this
> smaller pool of memory.

You would like to take the NUMA APIs and bifurcate them? Make some of
them able to work on this memory, and others not? So, set_mempolicy()
would work if you passed it one of these "special" nodes with
MPOL_F_ADDR, but would fail otherwise?

> Drawback of doing so would be that existing applications would not benefit
> from it. So workload where is acceptable to exhaust such memory wouldn't
> benefit until their application are updated.

I think the guys running 40-year-old fortran binaries might not be so
keen on this restriction. I bet there are a pretty substantial number
of folks out there that would love to get new hardware and just do:

numactl --membind=fast-node ./old-binary

If I were working for a hardware company, I'd sure like to just be able
to sell somebody some fancy new hardware and have their existing
software "just work" with a minimal wrapper.