Implications of Memory Interference for Composed HPC Applications

The cost of inter-node I/O and data movement is becoming increasingly prohibitive for large scale High Performance Computing (HPC) applications. This trend is leading to the emergence of composed in situ applications that co-locate multiple components on the same node. However, these components may contend for underlying memory system resources. In this extended research abstract, we present a preliminary evaluation of the impacts of contention for shared resources in the memory hierarchy, including the last level cache (LLC) and DRAM bandwidth. We show that even modest levels of memory contention can have substantial performance implications for some benchmarks, and argue for a cross layer approach to resource partitioning and scheduling on future HPC systems.