Title:
Evaluating the Impact of Memory Management on Energy Efficiency

Authors:
David DeBonis, University of New Mexico
Kevin Pedretti, Sandia National Laboratories
James H. Laros III, Sandia National Laboratories

Abstract:
OS and runtime management of power usage has been an active research area
for several years.  The typical approach taken is for system software to
statically or dynamically control the power management interfaces exposed
by hardware, for example P-state controls. This study takes a different
approach and examines the energy efficiency implications of the way a
fundamental hardware resource~--~memory~--~is managed by the OS.  Specifically,
we examine for a suite of benchmarks on three platforms the energy
efficiency impact of using small vs. large pages for virtual memory
management, using demand paged vs. physically contiguous virtual memory
layouts, and using nested paging hardware to accelerate virtual machine
operation.