Section: New Results

Smart placement of dynamically allocated objects for heterogeneous memory

Participant : Matthieu Moy.

As part of a partnership with the CITI laboratory (Tristan Delizy's PhD, co-supervised with Guillaume Salagnac and Tanguy Risset), we worked on dynamic memory memory allocation for embedded systems with heterogeneous memory. Unlike cache-based systems, our target architecture exposes several memory banks with different performance characteristics directly to the software, without any hardware mechanism like a cache or an MMU for memory management. The software needs to chose which memory bank to use at allocation time, and cannot change this choice afterwards. We proposed a profiling-based placement policy that is shown to be near-optimal for several applications, and performs much better than naive placement policies especially for systems with a small fraction of fast memory.

This work documented as part of Tristan Delizy's Ph.D manuscript, and we plan to submit it for a journal publication in 2020.