An Examination of Content Similarity within the Memory of HPC Applications

Memory content similarity has been e ectively exploited for more than a decade to reduce memory consumption. By consolidating duplicate and similar pages in the address space of an application, we can reduce the amount of memory it consumes without negatively a ecting the application's perception of the memory resources available to it. In addition to memory de-duplication, there may be many other ways that we can exploit memory content similarity to improve system characteristics. In this paper, we examine the memory content similarity of several HPC applications. By characterizing the memory contents of these applications, we hope to provide a basis for ef- forts to e ectively exploit memory content similarity to improve system performance beyond memory deduplication. We show that several applications exhibit signi cant similarity and consider the source of the similarity.