Using Intelligent Prefetching to Reduce the Energy Consumption of a Large-scale Storage System

Many high performance large-scale storage systems will experience significant workload increases as their user base and content availability grow over time. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) center hosts one such system that has recently undergone a period of rapid growth as its user population grew nearly 400% in just about three years. When administrators of these massive storage systems face the challenge of meeting the demands of an ever increasing number of requests, the easiest solution is to integrate more advanced hardware to existing systems. However, additional investment in hardware may significantly increase the system cost as well as daily power consumption. In this paper, we present evidence that well-selected software level optimization is capable of achieving comparable levels of performance without the cost and power consumption overhead caused by physically expanding the system. Specifically, we develop intelligent prefetching algorithms that are suitable for the unique workloads and user behaviors of the world\u27s largest satellite images distribution system managed by USGS EROS. Our experimental results, derived from real-world traces with over five million requests sent by users around the globe, show that the EROS hybrid storage system could maintain the same performance with over 30% of energy savings by utilizing our proposed prefetching algorithms, compared to the alternative solution of doubling the size of the current FTP server farm

CacheZoom: How SGX Amplifies The Power of Cache Attacks

In modern computing environments, hardware resources are commonly shared, and parallel computation is widely used. Parallel tasks can cause privacy and security problems if proper isolation is not enforced. Intel proposed SGX to create a trusted execution environment within the processor. SGX relies on the hardware, and claims runtime protection even if the OS and other software components are malicious. However, SGX disregards side-channel attacks. We introduce a powerful cache side-channel attack that provides system adversaries a high resolution channel. Our attack tool named CacheZoom is able to virtually track all memory accesses of SGX enclaves with high spatial and temporal precision. As proof of concept, we demonstrate AES key recovery attacks on commonly used implementations including those that were believed to be resistant in previous scenarios. Our results show that SGX cannot protect critical data sensitive computations, and efficient AES key recovery is possible in a practical environment. In contrast to previous works which require hundreds of measurements, this is the first cache side-channel attack on a real system that can recover AES keys with a minimal number of measurements. We can successfully recover AES keys from T-Table based implementations with as few as ten measurements.Comment: Accepted at Conference on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (CHES '17

An Intelligent Framework for Oversubscription Management in CPU-GPU Unified Memory

This paper proposes a novel intelligent framework for oversubscription management in CPU-GPU UVM. We analyze the current rule-based methods of GPU memory oversubscription with unified memory, and the current learning-based methods for other computer architectural components. We then identify the performance gap between the existing rule-based methods and the theoretical upper bound. We also identify the advantages of applying machine intelligence and the limitations of the existing learning-based methods. This paper proposes a novel intelligent framework for oversubscription management in CPU-GPU UVM. It consists of an access pattern classifier followed by a pattern-specific Transformer-based model using a novel loss function aiming for reducing page thrashing. A policy engine is designed to leverage the model's result to perform accurate page prefetching and pre-eviction. We evaluate our intelligent framework on a set of 11 memory-intensive benchmarks from popular benchmark suites. Our solution outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods for oversubscription management, reducing the number of pages thrashed by 64.4\% under 125\% memory oversubscription compared to the baseline, while the SOTA method reduces the number of pages thrashed by 17.3\%. Our solution achieves an average IPC improvement of 1.52X under 125\% memory oversubscription, and our solution achieves an average IPC improvement of 3.66X under 150\% memory oversubscription. Our solution outperforms the existing learning-based methods for page address prediction, improving top-1 accuracy by 6.45\% (up to 41.2\%) on average for a single GPGPU workload, improving top-1 accuracy by 10.2\% (up to 30.2\%) on average for multiple concurrent GPGPU workloads.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2203.1267