Leveraging a Heterogeneous Memory System for a Legacy Fortran Code: The Interplay of Storage Class Memory, DRAM and OS

Abstract

Large capacity Storage Class Memory (SCM) opens new possibilities for workloads requiring a large memory footprint. We examine optimization strategies for a legacy Fortran application on systems with an heterogeneous memory configuration comprising SCM and DRAM. We present a performance study for the multigrid solver component of the large-eddy simulation framework PALM for different memory configurations with large capacity SCM. An important optimization approach is the explicit assignment of storage locations depending on the data access characteristic to take advantage of the heterogeneous memory configuration. We are able to demonstrate that an explicit control over memory locations provides better performance compared to transparent hardware settings. As on aforementioned systems the page management by the OS appears as critical performance factor, we study the impact of different huge page settings.