MEMORY AWARENESS

Software rightfully insulates users from hardware details, particularly as we move up the software stack. But HPC applications, programming environments and system software cannot make key data movement decisions without some understanding of the hardware, particularly of the increasingly complex memory hierarchy. With the exception of runtimes, which treat memory in a domain-specific manner, software typically makes hardware-neutral decisions which can often result in poor performance We characterise this issue as ‘missing memory-awareness’.