High-Performance and Low-Power Magnetic Material Memory Based Cache Design

Magnetic memory technologies are very promising candidates to be universal memory due to its good scalability, zero standby power and radiation hardness. Having a cell area much smaller than SRAM, magnetic memory can be used to construct much larger cache with the same die footprint, leading to siginficant improvement of overall system performance and power consumption especially in this multi-core era. However, magnetic memories have their own drawbacks such as slow write, read disturbance and scaling limitation, making its usage as caches challenging. This dissertation comprehensively studied these two most popular magnetic memory technologies. Design exploration and optimization for the cache design from different design layers including the memory devices, peripheral circuit, memory array structure and micro-architecture are presented. By leveraging device features, two major micro-architectures -multi-retention cache hierarchy and process-variation-aware cache are presented to improve the write performance of STT-RAM. The enhancement in write performance results in the degradation of read operations, in terms of both speed and data reliability. This dissertation also presents an architecture to resolve STT-RAM read disturbance issue. Furthermore, the scaling of STT-RAM is hindered due to the required size of switching transistor. To break the cell area limitation of STT-RAM, racetrack memory is studied to achieve an even higher memory density and better performance and lower energy consumption. With dedicated elaboration, racetrack memory based cache design can achieve a siginificant area reduction and energy saving when compared to optimized STT-RAM

Technology Implications for Large Last-Level Caches

Large last-level cache (L3C) is efficient for bridging the performance and power gap between processor and memory. Several memory technologies, including SRAM, STT-RAM (MRAM), and embedded DRAM (eDRAM), have been used or considered as the technology to implement L3Cs. However, each of them has inherent weaknesses: SRAM is relatively low density and dissipates high leakage; STT-RAM has long write latency and requires high write energy; eDRAM requires refresh. As future processors are expected to have larger last-level caches, the objective of this dissertation is to study the tradeoffs associated with using each of these technologies to implement L3Cs. In order to make useful comparisons between L3Cs built with SRAM, STT-RAM, and eDRAM, we consider and implement several levels of details. First, to obtain unbiased cache performance and power properties (i.e., read/write access latency, read/write access energy, leakage power, refresh power, area), we prototype caches based on realistic memory and device models. Second, we present simplistic analytical models that enable us to quickly examine different memory technologies under various scenarios. Third, we review power-optimization techniques for each of the technologies, and propose using a low-cost dead-line prediction scheme for eDRAM-based L3Cs to eliminate unnecessary refreshes. Finally, the highlight of this dissertation is the comparison and analysis of low-leakage SRAM, low write-energy STT-RAM, and refresh-optimized eDRAM. We report system performance, last-level cache energy breakdown, and memory hierarchy energy breakdown, using an augmented full-system simulator with the execution of a range of workloads and input sets. From the insights gained through simulation results, STT-RAM has the highest potential to save energy in future L3C designs. For contemporary processors, SRAM-based L3C results in the fastest system performance, whereas eDRAM consumes the lowest energy

Application Centric Networks-On-Chip Design Solutions for Future Multicore Systems

With advances in technology, future multicore systems scaled to 100s and 1000s of cores/accelerators are being touted as an effective solution for extracting huge performance gains using parallel programming paradigms. However with the failure of Dennard Scaling all the components on the chip cannot be run simultaneously without breaking the power and thermal constraints leading to strict chip power envelops. The scaling up of the number of on chip components has also brought upon Networks-On-Chip (NoC) based interconnect designs like 2D mesh. The contribution of NoC to the total on chip power and overall performance has been increasing steadily and hence high performance power-efficient NoC designs are becoming crucial. Future multicore paradigms can be broadly classified, based on the applications they are tailored to, into traditional Chip Multi processor(CMP) based application based systems, characterized by low core and NoC utilization, and emerging big data application based systems, characterized by large amounts of data movement necessitating high throughput requirements. To this order, we propose NoC design solutions for power-savings in future CMPs tailored to traditional applications and higher effective throughput gains in multicore systems tailored to bandwidth intensive applications. First, we propose Fly-over, a light-weight distributed mechanism for power-gating routers attached to switched off cores to reduce NoC power consumption in low load CMP environment. Secondly, we plan on utilizing a promising next generation memory technology, Spin-Transfer Torque Magnetic RAM(STT-MRAM), to achieve enhanced NoC performance to satisfy the high throughput demands in emerging bandwidth intensive applications, while reducing the power consumption simultaneously. Thirdly, we present a hardware data approximation framework for NoCs, APPROX-NoC, with an online data error control mechanism, which can leverage the approximate computing paradigm in the emerging data intensive big data applications to attain higher performance per watt

Resource-aware scheduling for 2D/3D multi-/many-core processor-memory systems

This dissertation addresses the complexities of 2D/3D multi-/many-core processor-memory systems, focusing on two key areas: enhancing timing predictability in real-time multi-core processors and optimizing performance within thermal constraints. The integration of an increasing number of transistors into compact chip designs, while boosting computational capacity, presents challenges in resource contention and thermal management. The first part of the thesis improves timing predictability. We enhance shared cache interference analysis for set-associative caches, advancing the calculation of Worst-Case Execution Time (WCET). This development enables accurate assessment of cache interference and the effectiveness of partitioned schedulers in real-world scenarios. We introduce TCPS, a novel task and cache-aware partitioned scheduler that optimizes cache partitioning based on task-specific WCET sensitivity, leading to improved schedulability and predictability. Our research explores various cache and scheduling configurations, providing insights into their performance trade-offs. The second part focuses on thermal management in 2D/3D many-core systems. Recognizing the limitations of Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) in S-NUCA many-core processors, we propose synchronous thread migrations as a thermal management strategy. This approach culminates in the HotPotato scheduler, which balances performance and thermal safety. We also introduce 3D-TTP, a transient temperature-aware power budgeting strategy for 3D-stacked systems, reducing the need for Dynamic Thermal Management (DTM) activation. Finally, we present 3QUTM, a novel method for 3D-stacked systems that combines core DVFS and memory bank Low Power Modes with a learning algorithm, optimizing response times within thermal limits. This research contributes significantly to enhancing performance and thermal management in advanced processor-memory systems