Compute eXpress Link (CXL) is emerging as a promising memory interface technology. However, its performance characteristics remain largely unclear due to the limited availability of production hardware. Key questions include: What are the use cases for the CXL memory? What are the impacts of the CXL memory on application performance? How to use the CXL memory in combination with existing memory components? In this work, we study the performance of three genuine CXL memory-expansion cards from different vendors. We characterize the basic performance of the CXL memory, study how HPC applications and large language models (LLM) can benefit from the CXL memory, and study the interplay between memory tiering and page interleaving. We also propose a novel data object-level interleaving policy to match the interleaving policy with memory access patterns. Our findings reveal the challenges and opportunities of using the CXL memory.

ADMM-FFT is an iterative method with high reconstruction accuracy for laminography but suffers from excessive computation time and large memory consumption. We introduce mLR, which employs memoization to replace the time-consuming Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) operations based on an unique observation that similar FFT operations appear in iterations of ADMM-FFT. We introduce a series of techniques to make the application of memoization to ADMM-FFT performance-beneficial and scalable. We also introduce variable offloading to save CPU memory and scale ADMM-FFT across GPUs within and across nodes. Using mLR, we are able to scale ADMM-FFT on an input problem of 2K × 2K × 2K, which is the largest input problem laminography reconstruction has ever worked on with the ADMM-FFT solution on limited memory; mLR brings 52.8% performance improvement on average (up to 65.4%), compared to the original ADMM-FFT.

Message Passing Interface (MPI) is a foundational programming model for high-performance computing. MPI libraries traditionally employ network interconnects (e.g., Ethernet and InfiniBand) and network protocols (e.g., TCP and RoCE) with complex software stacks for cross-node communication.This paper presents cMPI, the first work to optimize MPI point-to-point communication (both one-sided and two-sided) using CXL memory sharing on a real CXL platform, transforming cross-node communication into memory transactions and data copies within CXL memory, bypassing traditional network protocols. We analyze performance across various interconnects and find that CXL memory sharing achieves 7.2 × -8.1 × lower latency than TCP-based interconnects deployed in small- and medium-scale clusters. We address challenges of CXL memory sharing for MPI communication, including data object management over the dax representation [50], cache coherence, and atomic operations. Overall, cMPI outperforms TCP over standard Ethernet NIC and high-end SmartNIC by up to 49 × and 72 × in latency and bandwidth, respectively, for small messages.