Abstract
The pre-exascale systems will soon be deployed with a deep, complex memory hierarchy composed of many heterogeneous memories. This presents multiple challenges for users including: how to allocate data objects with locality between memories and devices for the various memories in these systems, which includes DRAM, High-bandwidth Memory (HBM), and non-volatile random access memory (NVRAM), and how to perform these allocations while providing portability for their application. Currently, the user can make use of multiple, disjoint libraries to allocate data objects on these memories. However, it is difficult to obtain locality between memories and devices when using libraries that are unaware of each other. This paper presents the Unified Memory Allocator (UMA) of the SHARed data-structure centric Programming abstraction (SharP) library, which provides a unified interface for memory allocations across DRAM, HBM, and NVRAM and is extensible to support future memory types. In addition, the SharP UMA allows for portability between systems by supporting both explicit and implicit, intent-based memory allocations. To demonstrate the ease of use of the SharP UMA, we have extended both Open MPIand OpenSHMEM-Xto support SharP. We validate this work by evaluating the performance implications and intent-based approach with synthetic benchmarks as well as adaptations of the Graph500 benchmark.
