Contention-aware application performance prediction for disaggregated memory systems

Disaggregated memory has recently been proposed as a way to allow flexible and fine-grained allocation of memory capacity to compute jobs. This paper makes an important step towards effective resource allocation on disaggregated memory systems. Specifically, we propose a generic approach to predict the performance degradation due to sharing of disaggregated memory. In contrast to prior work, cache capacity is not shared among multiple applications, which removes a major contributor to application performance. For this reason, our analysis is driven by the demand for memory bandwidth, which has been shown to have an important effect on application performance. We show that profiling the application slowdown often involves significant experimental error and noise, and to this end, we improve the accuracy by linear smoothing of the sensitivity curves. We also show that contention is sensitive to the ratio between read and write memory accesses, and we address this sensitivity by building a family of sensitivity curves according to the read/write ratios. Our results show that the methodology predicts the slowdown in application performance subject to memory contention with an average error of 1.19% and max error of 14.6%. Compared with state-of-the-art, the relative improvements are almost 24% on average and 33% for the worst case.