Beyond Hotness: High-Resolution Memory Characterization of Cloud and LLM Workloads for Tiered Memory with ARM SPE

Overview & Synopsis

Memory demands from data analytics and LLM workloads grow rapidly, driving up memory costs in cloud and data centers. Multi-tier memory has emerged as a promising solution to balance performance and cost. However, effectively leveraging it requires a deep understanding of workload memory behaviors. This work introduces a high-resolution memory characterization methodology for analyzing workload-specific opportunities for multi-tier memory usage. In response to the increasing deployment of ARM-based processors in data centers, we implement our methodology using the recent Statistical Profiling Extension (SPE) for ARM. By characterizing eight memory-intensive workloads from CloudSuite and LLM applications, we identify region-specific access patterns, evaluate the effectiveness of cloud-oriented cache hierarchies, and propose new metrics based on memory idle periods and latency profiles to determine suitable data placement for tiered memory.