A Microbenchmark Characterization of the Emu Chick

The Emu Chick is a prototype system designed around the concept of migratory memory-side processing. Rather than transferring large amounts of data across power-hungry, high-latency interconnects, the Emu Chick moves lightweight thread contexts to near-memory cores before the beginning of each memory read. The current prototype hardware uses FPGAs to implement cache-less "Gossamer cores for doing computational work and a stationary core to run basic operating system functions and migrate threads between nodes. In this multi-node characterization of the Emu Chick, we extend an earlier single-node investigation (Hein, et al. AsHES 2018) of the the memory bandwidth characteristics of the system through benchmarks like STREAM, pointer chasing, and sparse matrix-vector multiplication. We compare the Emu Chick hardware to architectural simulation and an Intel Xeon-based platform. Our results demonstrate that for many basic operations the Emu Chick can use available memory bandwidth more efficiently than a more traditional, cache-based architecture although bandwidth usage suffers for computationally intensive workloads like SpMV. Moreover, the Emu Chick provides stable, predictable performance with up to 65% of the peak bandwidth utilization on a random-access pointer chasing benchmark with weak locality

Wrangling Rogues: Managing Experimental Post-Moore Architectures

The Rogues Gallery is a new experimental testbed that is focused on tackling "rogue" architectures for the Post-Moore era of computing. While some of these devices have roots in the embedded and high-performance computing spaces, managing current and emerging technologies provides a challenge for system administration that are not always foreseen in traditional data center environments. We present an overview of the motivations and design of the initial Rogues Gallery testbed and cover some of the unique challenges that we have seen and foresee with upcoming hardware prototypes for future post-Moore research. Specifically, we cover the networking, identity management, scheduling of resources, and tools and sensor access aspects of the Rogues Gallery and techniques we have developed to manage these new platforms