Gen-Z memory pool system implementation and performance measurement

Abstract

The Gen-Z protocol is a memory semantic protocol between the memory and CPU used in computer architectures with large memory pools. This study presents the implementation of the Gen-Z hardware system configured using Gen-Z specification 1.0 and reports its performance. A hardware prototype of a DDR4 Gen-Z memory pool with an optimized character, a block device driver, and a file system for the Gen-Z hardware was designed. The Gen-Z IP was targeted to the FPGA, and a 512 GB Gen-Z memory pool was configured on an 86 server. In the experiments, the latency and throughput of the Gen-Z memory were measured and compared with those of the local memory, SATA SSD, and NVMe using character or block device interfaces. The Gen-Z hardware exhibited superior throughput and latency performance compared with SATA SSD and NVMe at block sizes under 4 kB. The MySQL and File IO benchmark of Gen-Z showed good write performance in all block sizes and threads. Besides, it showed low latency in RocksDB's fillseq dbbench using the ext4 direct access filesystem.

Keywords

• cxl
• gen-z
• memory centric computing
• memory pool
• pmdk