Metall: A Persistent Memory Allocator for Data-Centric Analytics

• Provides rich memory allocation interfaces for C++ applications that use persistent memory devices to persistently store heap data on such devices.
• Creates files in persistent memory and maps them into virtual memory space so that users can access the mapped region just as normal memory regions allocated in DRAM.
• Actual persistent memory hardware could be any non-volatile memory (NVM) with file system support.
• To provide persistent memory allocation, Metall employs concepts and APIs developed by Boost.Interprocess.
• Supports multi-thread
• Also provides a space-efficient snapshot/versioning, leveraging reflink copy mechanism in filesystem. In case reflink is not supported, Metall automatically falls back to regular copy.
• See details: Metall overview slides.

Getting Started

Metall consists of only header files and requires some header files in Boost C++ Libraries.

All core files exist under metall/include/metall/.

Required

• Boost C++ Libraries 1.64 or more.
  • Build is not required; needs only their header files.
  • To use JSON containers in Metall, Boost C++ Libraries 1.75 or more is required.
• C++17 compiler
  • Tested with GCC 8.1 or more; however, 8.3 or more is recommended due to early implementation of the C++ Filesystem library.

Build

To build your program with Metall, all you have to do is just setting include paths such as '-I' or CPLUS_INCLUDE_PATH.

For example,

# Download Boost (Boost C++ Libraries 1.64 or more is required)
# One can skip this step if Boost is already available.
wget https://boostorg.jfrog.io/artifactory/main/release/1.78.0/source/boost_1_78_0.tar.gz
tar xvf boost_1_78_0.tar.gz
export BOOST_ROOT=$PWD/boost_1_78_0

git clone https://github.com/LLNL/metall
export METALL_INCLUDE=$PWD/metall/include

g++ -std=c++17 your_program.cpp -lstdc++fs -I${BOOST_ROOT} -I${METALL_INCLUDE}

Unofficial Support For Clang

Clang can be used instead of GCC to build Metall. However, we haven't tested it intensively. Also, Boost C++ Libraries 1.69 or more may be required if one wants to build Metall with Clang + CUDA.

Metall with Spack

Metall package is also available on Spack.

As Metall depends on Boost C++ Libraries, Spack also installs a proper version of Boost C++ Libraries automatically, if needed.

# Install Metall and Boost C++ Libraries
spack install metall

# Sets environment variables: BOOST_ROOT and METALL_ROOT.
# Boost C++ Libraries and Metall are installed at the locations, respectively.
spack load metall

# Build a program that uses Metall
# Please note that one has to put 'include' at the end of BOOST_ROOT and METALL_ROOT
g++ -std=c++17 your_program.cpp -lstdc++fs -I${BOOST_ROOT}/include -I${METALL_ROOT}/include

Use Metall from Another CMake Project

To download and/or link Metall package from a CMake project, see example CMake files placed here.

Build Example Programs

Metall repository contains some example programs under example directory. One can use CMake to build the examples. For more details, see a page here.

Documentations

• Full documentation
• API documentation

Generate API documentation using Doxygen

A Doxygen configuration file is here.

To generate API document:

cd metall
mkdir build_doc
cd build_doc
doxygen ../docs/Doxyfile.in

Publication

Keita Iwabuchi, Karim Youssef, Kaushik Velusamy, Maya Gokhale, Roger Pearce,
Metall: A persistent memory allocator for data-centric analytics,
Parallel Computing, 2022, 102905, ISSN 0167-8191, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.parco.2022.102905.

• Parallel Computing (journal)

• arXiv (preprint)

About

Contact

• GitHub Issues is open.

• Primary contact: Keita Iwabuchi (LLNL).

License

Metall is distributed under the terms of both the MIT license and the Apache License (Version 2.0). Users may choose either license, at their option.

All new contributions must be made under both the MIT and Apache-2.0 licenses.

See LICENSE-MIT, LICENSE-APACHE, NOTICE, and COPYRIGHT for details.

SPDX-License-Identifier: (Apache-2.0 OR MIT)

Release

LLNL-CODE-768617