Preface: HPE Cray OS Based on standard SUSE Enterprise Linux Server 15. A supercomputer, dubbed Frontier, was developed by HPE Cray. Frontier and HPE Cray OS to run standard Linux applications, but rather enhance it for performance, scale, and reliability.

Ref: Frontier is based on the latest HPE Cray EX235a architecture and equipped with AMD EPYC 64C 2GHz processors. The system has 8,699,904 total cores, a power efficiency rating of 52.59 gigaflops/watt, and relies on Slingshot-11 interconnect for data transfer.  

SUSE Enterprise Linux Server 15: How to manages memory in units called pages?

Linux manages memory in units called pages (default page size is 4 KB). Linux and the CPU need to know which pages belong to which process. Those parameters stored in a page table. If high volume of processes are running, it takes more time to fnd where the memory is mapped, because of the time required to search the page table. To speed up the search, the TLB (Translation Lookaside Buer) was invented. But on a system with a lot of memory, the TLB is not enough.

To avoid any fallback to normal page table (resulting in a cache miss, which is time consuming), huge pages can be used. Using huge pages will reduce TLB overhead and TLB misses (pagewalk).

Example: A host with 32 GB (32*1014*1024 = 33,554,432 KB) of memory and a 4 KB page size has a TLB with 33,554,432/4 = 8,388,608 entries. Using a 2 MB (2048 KB) page size, the TLB only has 33554432/2048 = 16384 entries, considerably reducing the TLB misses.