Summary: Reducing Network Latency Using Subpages in a
Global Memory Environment
Herv’e A. Jamrozik, Michael J. Feeley, Geoffrey M. Voelker, James Evans II
Anna R. Karlin, Henry M. Levy, and Mary K. Vernon
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of Washington
First published in the ``Proceedings of the Seventh ACM Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems'', October 1996.
Also available as Technical Report UW­CSE­96­07­03.
Abstract
New high­speed networks greatly encourage the use of network
memory as a cache for virtual memory and file pages, thereby re­
ducing the need for disk access. Becausepages are the fundamental
transfer and access units in remote memory systems, page size is a
key performance factor. Recently, page sizes of modern processors
have been increasing in order to provide more TLB coverage and
amortize disk access costs. Unfortunately, for high­speed networks,
small transfers are needed to provide low latency. This trend in page
size is thus at odds with the use of network memory on high­speed
networks.
This paper studies the use of subpages as a means of reducing

Source: Anderson, Richard - Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington at Seattle

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences