Avoiding core's DUE & SDC via acoustic wave detectors and tailored error containment and recovery

The trend of downsizing transistors and operating voltage scaling has made the processor chip more sensitive against radiation phenomena making soft errors an important challenge. New reliability techniques for handling soft errors in the logic and memories that allow meeting the desired failures-in-time (FIT) target are key to keep harnessing the benefits of Moore's law. The failure to scale the soft error rate caused by particle strikes, may soon limit the total number of cores that one may have running at the same time. This paper proposes a light-weight and scalable architecture to eliminate silent data corruption errors (SDC) and detected unrecoverable errors (DUE) of a core. The architecture uses acoustic wave detectors for error detection. We propose to recover by confining the errors in the cache hierarchy, allowing us to deal with the relatively long detection latencies. Our results show that the proposed mechanism protects the whole core (logic, latches and memory arrays) incurring performance overhead as low as 0.60%. © 2014 IEEE.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationThe computing landscape is undergoing a major change, primarily enabled by ubiquitous wireless networks and the rapid increase in the use of mobile devices which access a web-based information infrastructure. It is expected that most intensive computing may either happen in servers housed in large datacenters (warehouse- scale computers), e.g., cloud computing and other web services, or in many-core high-performance computing (HPC) platforms in scientific labs. It is clear that the primary challenge to scaling such computing systems into the exascale realm is the efficient supply of large amounts of data to hundreds or thousands of compute cores, i.e., building an efficient memory system. Main memory systems are at an inflection point, due to the convergence of several major application and technology trends. Examples include the increasing importance of energy consumption, reduced access stream locality, increasing failure rates, limited pin counts, increasing heterogeneity and complexity, and the diminished importance of cost-per-bit. In light of these trends, the memory system requires a major overhaul. The key to architecting the next generation of memory systems is a combination of the prudent incorporation of novel technologies, and a fundamental rethinking of certain conventional design decisions. In this dissertation, we study every major element of the memory system - the memory chip, the processor-memory channel, the memory access mechanism, and memory reliability, and identify the key bottlenecks to efficiency. Based on this, we propose a novel main memory system with the following innovative features: (i) overfetch-aware re-organized chips, (ii) low-cost silicon photonic memory channels, (iii) largely autonomous memory modules with a packet-based interface to the proces- sor, and (iv) a RAID-based reliability mechanism. Such a system is energy-efficient, high-performance, low-complexity, reliable, and cost-effective, making it ideally suited to meet the requirements of future large-scale computing systems

Doctor of Philosophy in Computing

dissertatio

A heterogeneous memory organization with minimum energy consumption in 3D chip-multiprocessors

Main memories play an important role in overall energy consumption of embedded systems. Using conventional memory technologies in future designs in nanoscale era cause a drastic increase in leakage power consumption and temperature-related problems. Emerging non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies offer many desirable characteristics such as near-zero leakage power, high density and non-volatility. They can significantly mitigate the issue of memory leakage power in future embedded chip-multiprocessor (eCMP) systems. However, they suffer from challenges such as limited write endurance and high write energy consumption which restrict them for adoption in modern memory systems. In this article, we propose a stacked hybrid memory system for 3D chip-multiprocessors to take advantages of both traditional and non-volatile memory technologies. For reaching this target, we present a convex optimization-based model that minimizes the system energy consumption while satisfy endurance constraint in order to design a reliable memory system. Experimental results show that the proposed method improves energy-delay product (EDP) and performance by about 44.8% and 13.8% on average respectively compared with the traditional memory design where single technology is used. © 2016 IEEE

OptMem: Dark-silicon aware low latency hybrid memory design

In this article, we present a convex optimization model to design a three dimension (3D)stacked hybrid memory system to improve performance in the dark silicon era. Our convex model optimizes numbers and placement of static random access memory (SRAM) and spin-Transfer torque magnetic random-Access memory(STT-RAM) memories on the memory layer to exploit advantages of both technologies. Power consumption that is the main challenge in the dark silicon era is represented as a main constraint in this work and it is satisfied by the detailed optimization model in order to design a dark silicon aware 3D Chip-Multiprocessor (CMP). Experimental results show that the proposed architecture improves the energy consumption and performanceof the 3D CMPabout 25.8% and 12.9% on averagecompared to the Baseline memory design. © 2016 IEEE

Hybrid stacked memory architecture for energy efficient embedded chip-multiprocessors based on compiler directed approach

Energy consumption becomes the most critical limitation on the performance of nowadays embedded system designs. On-chip memories due to major contribution in overall system energy consumption are always significant issue for embedded systems. Using conventional memory technologies in future designs in nano-scale era causes a drastic increase in leakage power consumption and temperature-related problems. Emerging non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies are promising replacement for conventional memory structure in embedded systems due to its attractive characteristics such as near-zero leakage power, high density and non-volatility. Recent advantages of NVM technologies can significantly mitigate the issue of memory leakage power. However, they introduce new challenges such as limited write endurance and high write energy consumption which restrict them for adoption in modern memory systems. In this article, we propose a stacked hybrid memory system to minimize energy consumption for 3D embedded chip-multiprocessors (eCMP). For reaching this target, we present a convex optimization-based model to distribute data blocks between SRAM and NVM banks based on data access pattern derived by compiler. Our compiler-assisted hybrid memory architecture can achieve up to 51.28 times improvement in lifetime. In addition, experimental results show that our proposed method reduce energy consumption by 56% on average compared to the traditional memory design where single technology is used. © 2015 IEEE

ATCache: Reducing DRAM-cache Latency via a Small SRAM Tag Cache

ABSTRACT 3D-stacking technology has enabled the option of embedding a large DRAM onto the processor. Prior works have proposed to use this as a DRAM cache. Because of its large size (a DRAM cache can be in the order of hundreds of megabytes), the total size of the tags associated with it can also be quite large (in the order of tens of megabytes). The large size of the tags has created a problem. Should we maintain the tags in the DRAM and pay the cost of a costly tag access in the critical path? Or should we maintain the tags in the faster SRAM by paying the area cost of a large SRAM for this purpose? Prior works have primarily chosen the former and proposed a variety of techniques for reducing the cost of a DRAM tag access. In this paper, we first establish (with the help of a study) that maintaining the tags in SRAM, because of its smaller access latency, leads to overall better performance. Motivated by this study, we ask if it is possible to maintain tags in SRAM without incurring high area overhead. Our key idea is simple. We propose to cache the tags in a small SRAM tag cache -we show that there is enough spatial and temporal locality amongst tag accesses to merit this idea. We propose the ATCache which is a small SRAM tag cache. Similar to a conventional cache, the ATCache caches recently accessed tags to exploit temporal locality; it exploits spatial locality by prefetching tags from nearby cache sets. In order to avoid the high miss latency and cache pollution caused by excessive prefetching, we use a simple technique to throttle the number of sets prefetched. Our proposed ATCache (which consumes 0.4% of overall tag size) can satisfy over 60% of DRAM cache tag accesses on average

Specific Read Only Data Management for Memory Hierarchy Optimization

International audienceThe multiplication of the number of cores inside embedded systems has raised the pressure on the memory hierarchy. The cost of coherence protocol and the scalability problem of the memory hierarchy is nowadays a major issue. In this paper, a specific data management for read-only data is in-vestigated because these data can be duplicated in several memories without being tracked. Based on analysis of stan-dard benchmarks for embedded systems, we show that read-only data represent 62% of all the data used by applications and 18% of all the memory accesses. A specific data path for read-only data is then evaluated by using simulations. On the first level of the memory hierarchy, removing read-only data of the L1 cache and placing them in another read-only cache improve the data locality of the read-write data by 30% and decrease the total energy consumption of the first level memory by 5%