Elastic Memory Management of Virtualized Infrastructures for Applications with Dynamic Memory Requirements

This paper addresses the impact of vertical elasticity for applications with dynamic memory requirements when running on a virtualized environment. Vertical elasticity is the ability to scale up and scale down the capabilities of a Virtual Machine (VM). In particular, we focus on dynamic memory management to automatically fit at runtime the underlying computing infrastructure to the application, thus adapting the memory size of the VM to the memory consumption pattern of the application. It is described an architecture, together with a proof-of-concept implementation, that dynamically adapts the memory size of the VM to prevent thrashing while reducing the excess of unused VM memory. For the test case, a synthetic benchmark is employed that reproduces different patterns that arise on real scientific applications. The results show that vertical elasticity, in the shape of dynamic memory management, enables to mitigate memory overprovisioning at controlled application performance penalty.