Application Agnostic, Analytical Modeling of End-To-End Memory Hierarchy

Analytical modeling of memory hierarchy is typically discussed from the perspective of CPU architecture. From the perspective of service tiers Storage-Network-Compute paradigm, memory hierarchy plays a pivotal role for serving data and meeting stringent SLA for applications.

All applications today evolve over time, this appears as a completely different workload to the service tiers. All the tools-and-techniques available allow us to measure and determine the memory requirement in pockets of the overall configuration while provisioning initially. The standard practice of over-provision results in sub-optimal resource allocation and usage.

The solution is to stitch together the end to end memory requirement and provide knobs to try out various parametric manipulations. This approach allows tweaking various parameters and come up with a deterministic requirement of memory at various levels. E.g.: keeping block size constant, change the pattern (sequential-random-access), mix (Read-Write percentage) and the IO working set, cache-agnostic eviction policy, IO concurrency etc.

Learning Objectives

Looking at memory requirement from an end to end perspective
How do we account for changing memory requirement while the application is evolving over time
What solution is the most cost effective and serves my application needs over its lifetime
A step towards making my application to be cloud-fit