Dong Ryu Kyung, David Daly, et al.
IPDPS 2008
The economics of server consolidation have led to the support of virtualization features in almost all server-class systems, with the related feature set being a subject of significant competition. While most systems allow for partitioning at the relatively coarse grain of a single core, some systems also support multiprogrammed virtualization, whereby a system can be more finely partitioned through time-sharing, down to a percentage of a core being allotted to a virtual machine. When multiple virtual machines share a single core however, performance can suffer due to the displacement of microarchitectural state. We introduce cache restoration, a hardware-based prefetching mechanism initiated by the underlying virtualization software when a virtual machine is being scheduled on a core, prefetching its working set and warming its initial environment. Through cycle-accurate simulation of a POWER7 system, we show that when applied to its private per-core L3 last-level cache, the warm cache translates into 20% on average performance improvement for a mixture of workloads on a highly partitioned core, compared to a virtualized server without cache restoration. © 2012 IEEE.
Dong Ryu Kyung, David Daly, et al.
IPDPS 2008
Jeffrey Stuecheli, Dimitris Kaseridis, et al.
ISCA 2010
Calin Cascaval, Colin Blundell, et al.
Communications of the ACM
Christoph Von Praun, Harold W. Cain, et al.
ISCA 2006