Umpire: Application-Focused Management and Coordination of Complex Hierarchical Memory

Journal Article · 20 November 2019 · IBM Journal of Research and Development

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1147/JRD.2019.2954403 · OSTI ID:1633516

Beckingsale, David A. ^[1]; Mcfadden, Marty J. ^[1]; Dahm, Johann P. S. ^[2]; Pankajakshan, Ramesh ^[1]; Hornung, Richard D. ^[1]

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1. Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)
2. Johann P. S. Dahm Vulcan Inc., Seattle, WA (United States)

Advanced architectures like Sierra provide a wide range of memory resources that must often be carefully controlled by the user. These resources have varying capacities, access timing rules, and visibility to different compute resources. Applications must intelligently allocate data in these spaces, and depending on the total amount of memory required, applications may also be forced to move data between different parts of the memory hierarchy. Finally, applications using multiple packages must coordinate effectively to ensure that each package can use the memory resources it needs. To address these challenges, we present Umpire, an application-oriented library for managing memory resources. Specifically, Umpire provides support for querying memory resources, provisioning and allocating memory, and memory introspection. It allows computer scientists and computational physicists to efficiently program the memory hierarchies of current and future high-performance computing architectures, without tying their application to specific hardware or software. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of Umpire and present case studies from the integration of Umpire into applications that are currently running on Sierra.

• Research Organization: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)
• Grant/Contract Number: AC52-07NA27344
• OSTI ID: 1633516
• Report Number(s): LLNL-JRNL--788147; 986024
• Journal Information: IBM Journal of Research and Development, Journal Name: IBM Journal of Research and Development Journal Issue: 3/4 Vol. 64; ISSN 0018-8646
• Publisher: IEEECopyright Statement
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English