Enhancing Applications Performance on Intel Paragon through Dynamic Memory Allocation

The Paragon operating system (OS) supports virtual memory (VM). The OS manages virtual memory by performing two services. Firstly, paging-in service pages the executable code from the service node to the compute nodes. This includes the paging-in of empty data corresponding to statically allocated arrays. Secondly, pagingout service is performed by paging the unused part of the OSF server to the boot node to make space available for the user’s executable code. These paging-in and pagingout activities take place simultaneously and drastically degrade the performance of the user code. We have investigated this problem in detail, and found that the dynamic allocation of memory completely eliminates the unnecessary and undesirable effects of paging-in empty data arrays from the service node to the compute nodes and thereby increases the performance of the applications considered in the present work by 30% to 40%.