Buri: Scaling Big-Memory Computing with Hardware-Based Memory Expansion

Motivated by the challenges of scaling up memory capacity and fully exploiting the benefits of memory compression, we propose Buri, a hardware-based memory compression scheme, which simultaneously achieves cost efficiency, high performance, and ease of adoption. Buri combines (1) a self-contained, ready-to-adopt hardware compression module, which manages metadata compression and memory allocation/relocation operations; (2) a set of hardware optimization mechanisms, which reduce the area and performance overheads in accommodating the address indirection required by memory compression; and (3) lightweight BIOS/OS extensions used to handle exceptions. Our evaluation with large memory workload traces shows that Buri can increase capacity by 70%, in addition to the compression ratio already provided by database software.