The Reading Warehouse

This book provides computer engineers, academic researchers, new graduate students, and seasoned practitioners an end-to-end overview of virtual memory. We begin with a recap of foundational concepts and discuss not only state-of-the-art virtual memory hardware and software support available today, but also emerging research trends in this space. The span of topics covers processor microarchitecture, memory systems, operating system design, and memory allocation. We show how efficient virtual memory implementations hinge on careful hardware and software cooperation, and we discuss new research directions aimed at addressing emerging problems in this space.

Virtual memory is a classic computer science abstraction and one of the pillars of the computing revolution. It has long enabled hardware flexibility, software portability, and overall better security, to name just a few of its powerful benefits. Nearly all user-level programs today take for granted that they will have been freed from the burden of physical memory management by the hardware, the operating system, device drivers, and system libraries.

However, despite its ubiquity in systems ranging from warehouse-scale datacenters to embedded Internet of Things (IoT) devices, the overheads of virtual memory are becoming a critical performance bottleneck today. Virtual memory architectures designed for individual CPUs or even individual cores are in many cases struggling to scale up and scale out to today's systems which now increasingly include exotic hardware accelerators (such as GPUs, FPGAs, or DSPs) and emerging memory technologies (such as non-volatile memory), and which run increasingly intensive workloads (such as virtualized and/or "big data" applications). As such, many of the fundamental abstractions and implementation approaches for virtual memory are being augmented, extended, or entirely rebuilt in order to ensure that virtual memory remains viable and performant in the years to come.

Margaret Martonosi is the Hugh Trumbull Adams '35 Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University, where she has been on the faculty since 1994. She is also currently serving a four-year term as Director of the Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education. Martonosi holds affiliated faculty appointments in Princeton EE, the Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP), the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, and the Princeton Environmental Institute. She also holds an affiliated faculty appointment in Princeton EE. From 2005-2007, she served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs for the Princeton University School of Engineering and Applied Science. In 2011, she served as Acting Director of Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP). From August 2015 through March, 2017, she served as a Jefferson Science Fellow within the U.S. Department of State.

Martonosi's research interests are in computer architecture and mobile computing, with particular focus on power-efficient systems. Her work has included the development of the Wattch power modeling tool and the Princeton ZebraNet mobile sensor network project for the design and real-world deployment of zebra tracking collars in Kenya. Her current research focuses on hardware-software interface approaches to manage heterogeneous parallelism and power-performance tradeoffs in systems ranging from smartphones to chip multiprocessors to large-scale data centers.

Martonosi is a Fellow of both IEEE and ACM. Notable awards include the 2010 Princeton University Graduate Mentoring Award, the 2013 NCWIT Undergraduate Research Mentoring Award, the 2013 Anita Borg Institute Technical Leadership Award, the 2015 Marie Pistilli Women in EDA Achievement Award, the 2015 ISCA Long-Term Influential Paper Award, and the 2017 ACM SIGMOBILE Test-of-Time Award. In addition to many archival publications, Martonosi is an inventor on seven granted US patents, and has co-authored two technical reference books on power-aware computer architecture. She has served on the Board of Directors of the Computing Research Association (CRA), and will co-chair CRA-W from 2017-2020. Martonosi completed her Ph.D. at Stanford University, and also holds a Master's degree from Stanford and a bachelor's degree from Cornell University, all in Electrical Engineering.