2,099 research outputs found
Energy Saving Techniques for Phase Change Memory (PCM)
In recent years, the energy consumption of computing systems has increased
and a large fraction of this energy is consumed in main memory. Towards this,
researchers have proposed use of non-volatile memory, such as phase change
memory (PCM), which has low read latency and power; and nearly zero leakage
power. However, the write latency and power of PCM are very high and this,
along with limited write endurance of PCM present significant challenges in
enabling wide-spread adoption of PCM. To address this, several
architecture-level techniques have been proposed. In this report, we review
several techniques to manage power consumption of PCM. We also classify these
techniques based on their characteristics to provide insights into them. The
aim of this work is encourage researchers to propose even better techniques for
improving energy efficiency of PCM based main memory.Comment: Survey, phase change RAM (PCRAM
Reliable and Energy Efficient MLC STT-RAM Buffer for CNN Accelerators
We propose a lightweight scheme where the formation of a data block is changed in such a way that it can tolerate soft errors significantly better than the baseline. The key insight behind our work is that CNN weights are normalized between -1 and 1 after each convolutional layer, and this leaves one bit unused in half-precision floating-point representation. By taking advantage of the unused bit, we create a backup for the most significant bit to protect it against the soft errors. Also, considering the fact that in MLC STT-RAMs the cost of memory operations (read and write), and reliability of a cell are content-dependent (some patterns take larger current and longer time, while they are more susceptible to soft error), we rearrange the data block to minimize the number of costly bit patterns. Combining these two techniques provides the same level of accuracy compared to an error-free baseline while improving the read and write energy by 9% and 6%, respectively
Improving the Performance and Endurance of Persistent Memory with Loose-Ordering Consistency
Persistent memory provides high-performance data persistence at main memory.
Memory writes need to be performed in strict order to satisfy storage
consistency requirements and enable correct recovery from system crashes.
Unfortunately, adhering to such a strict order significantly degrades system
performance and persistent memory endurance. This paper introduces a new
mechanism, Loose-Ordering Consistency (LOC), that satisfies the ordering
requirements at significantly lower performance and endurance loss. LOC
consists of two key techniques. First, Eager Commit eliminates the need to
perform a persistent commit record write within a transaction. We do so by
ensuring that we can determine the status of all committed transactions during
recovery by storing necessary metadata information statically with blocks of
data written to memory. Second, Speculative Persistence relaxes the write
ordering between transactions by allowing writes to be speculatively written to
persistent memory. A speculative write is made visible to software only after
its associated transaction commits. To enable this, our mechanism supports the
tracking of committed transaction ID and multi-versioning in the CPU cache. Our
evaluations show that LOC reduces the average performance overhead of memory
persistence from 66.9% to 34.9% and the memory write traffic overhead from
17.1% to 3.4% on a variety of workloads.Comment: This paper has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Parallel and
Distributed System
Design Guidelines for High-Performance SCM Hierarchies
With emerging storage-class memory (SCM) nearing commercialization, there is
evidence that it will deliver the much-anticipated high density and access
latencies within only a few factors of DRAM. Nevertheless, the
latency-sensitive nature of memory-resident services makes seamless integration
of SCM in servers questionable. In this paper, we ask the question of how best
to introduce SCM for such servers to improve overall performance/cost over
existing DRAM-only architectures. We first show that even with the most
optimistic latency projections for SCM, the higher memory access latency
results in prohibitive performance degradation. However, we find that
deployment of a modestly sized high-bandwidth 3D stacked DRAM cache makes the
performance of an SCM-mostly memory system competitive. The high degree of
spatial locality that memory-resident services exhibit not only simplifies the
DRAM cache's design as page-based, but also enables the amortization of
increased SCM access latencies and the mitigation of SCM's read/write latency
disparity.
We identify the set of memory hierarchy design parameters that plays a key
role in the performance and cost of a memory system combining an SCM technology
and a 3D stacked DRAM cache. We then introduce a methodology to drive
provisioning for each of these design parameters under a target
performance/cost goal. Finally, we use our methodology to derive concrete
results for specific SCM technologies. With PCM as a case study, we show that a
two bits/cell technology hits the performance/cost sweet spot, reducing the
memory subsystem cost by 40% while keeping performance within 3% of the best
performing DRAM-only system, whereas single-level and triple-level cell
organizations are impractical for use as memory replacements.Comment: Published at MEMSYS'1
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