Virtual Memory

January 7, 2019, Filed Under: Cache Coherence Implementations, Cache Coherence Protocols, Computer Architecture, Linux, Performance Counters

SC18 paper: HPL and DGEMM performance variability on Intel Xeon Platinum 8160 processors

Here are the annotated slides from my SC18 presentation on Snoop Filter Conflicts that cause performance variability in HPL and DGEMM on the Xeon Platinum 8160 processor. This slide presentation includes data (not included in the paper) showing that Snoop Filter Conflicts occur in all Intel Scalable Processors (a.k.a., “Skylake… read more

March 12, 2012, Filed Under: Computer Architecture, Computer Hardware, Performance, Reference

What good are “Large Pages” ?

I am often asked what “Large Pages” in computer systems are good for. For commodity (x86_64) processors, “small pages” are 4KiB, while “large pages” are (typically) 2MiB. The size of the page controls how many bits are translated between virtual and physical addresses, and so represent a trade-off between what… read more

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