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NUMA-Node-Pinned Buffer Allocation (Portable Simulation)

Medium · memory_optimization · Quant Developer interview question · numa, memory_optimization, page-fault, prefault, allocation, ring-buffer

In high-frequency trading (HFT), minimizing latency is critical. On modern multi-socket servers with Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) architecture, memory access latency varies depending on the CPU core and memory location. Pinning memory allocations to the same NUMA node as the network card is a standard optimization to avoid cross-node latency penalties on every packet received. Task Implement the function long numa_alloc_simulate(long size_kb) to simulate a NUMA-local memory allocation. The