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                         <___'  --- CXL performance analysis suite

Description

Melody is a framework for systematic characterization and analysis of CXL memory performance. Melody builds on an extensive evaluation spanning hundered of workloads on different CPU platforms with 4 CXL devices. It revealed several interesting insights: workload sensitivity to sub-microsecond CXL latencies (140–410 ns), the first disclosure of CXL tail latencies, CPU tolerance to CXL-induced delays, a novel approach SPA for pinpointing CXL bottlenecks, and CPU prefetcher inefficiencies caused by CXL's high latency.

It contains:

• MIO: latency microbenchmark
• SPA: Stall-based Performance Analysis
• data: performance slowdown data

For more detail, please read the paper: Systematic CXL Memory Characterization and Performance Analysis at Scale [ASPLOS'25]

Testing Platforms

Platforms tested in the paper:

• SKX A: Two Intel Xeon Silver 4114 10-core CPUs at 2.20 GHz, 192GB DDR4 Memory
• SKX B: Eight Intel Xeon Platinum 8180 28-core CPUs at 2.50GHz, 376GB DDR4 Memory
• SPR: Two Intel Xeon Gold 6430 32-core CPUs at 2.10 GHz, 256GB DDR5 Memory
• EMR A: Two Intel Xeon Gold 6530 32-core CPUs at 2.10 GHz, 256GB DDR5 Memory
• EMR B: Two Intel Xeon Platinum 8573C 52-core CPUs at at 2.30 GHz, 3TB DDR5 Memory

Citation

@inproceedings{liu2025systematic,
  author = {Liu, Jinshu and Hadian, Hamid and Wang, Yuyue and Berger, Daniel S. and Nguyen, Marie and Jian, Xun and Noh, Sam H. and Li, Huaicheng},
  title = {Systematic CXL Memory Characterization and Performance Analysis at Scale},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, Volume 2},
  pages = {1203--1217},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.1145/3676641.3715987}
}

Contact

Maintainer: Jinshu Liu, jinshu@vt.edu