Large Pages on Steroids: Small Ideas to Accelerate Big Memory Applications

Utilizing small (e.g., 4KB) pages incurs frequent TLB misses on modern big memory applications, substantially degrading the performance of the system. Large (e.g., 1GB) pages or direct segments can alleviate this penalty due to page table walks, but at the same time such a strategy exposes the organizational and operational details of modern DRAM-based memory systems to applications. Row-buffer…