HIPEC - A SYSTEM FOR APPLICATION-CUSTOMIZED VIRTUAL-MEMORY CACHING MANAGEMENT

Conventional operating systems employ a kernel-controlled caching stra tegy that cannot properly serve all access-pattern types used by appli cations. When running under these systems, many memory-intensive appli cations with mis-matching access patterns cause excessive page faults and page replacements that reduce the application's performance. This paper presents the hipec system, which allows applications to have the ir own caching strategies for managing page frames with negligible ove rhead. Since application designers know the access patterns of their a pplications, the specific caching strategies can be tuned to meet the needs of each application. Empirical results show that the hipec syste m significantly improves application performance and system throughput . (C) 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.