Scalable Far Memory: Balancing Faults and Evictions

Page-based far memory systems transparently expand an application's memory capacity beyond a single machine without modifying application code. However, existing systems are tailored to scenarios with low application thread counts, and fail to scale on today's multi-core machines. This makes them unsuitable for data-intensive applications that both rely on far memory support and scale with increasing thread count. Our analysis reveals that this poor scalability stems from inefficient holistic coordination between page fault-in and eviction operations. As thread count increases, current systems encounter scalability bottlenecks in TLB shootdowns, page accounting, and memory allocation.