Energy-Aware Data Movement In Non-Volatile Memory Hierarchies

While technology scaling enables increased density for memory cells, the intrinsic high leakage power of conventional CMOS technology and the demand for reduced energy consumption inspires the use of emerging technology alternatives such as eDRAM and Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) including STT-MRAM, PCM, and RRAM. The utilization of emerging technology in Last Level Cache (LLC) designs which occupies a signifcant fraction of total die area in Chip Multi Processors (CMPs) introduces new dimensions of vulnerability, energy consumption, and performance delivery. To be specific, a part of this research focuses on eDRAM Bit Upset Vulnerability Factor (BUVF) to assess vulnerable portion of the eDRAM refresh cycle where the critical charge varies depending on the write voltage, storage and bit-line capacitance. This dissertation broaden the study on vulnerability assessment of LLC through investigating the impact of Process Variations (PV) on narrow resistive sensing margins in high-density NVM arrays, including on-chip cache and primary memory. Large-latency and power-hungry Sense Amplifers (SAs) have been adapted to combat PV in the past. Herein, a novel approach is proposed to leverage the PV in NVM arrays using Self-Organized Sub-bank (SOS) design. SOS engages the preferred SA alternative based on the intrinsic as-built behavior of the resistive sensing timing margin to reduce the latency and power consumption while maintaining acceptable access time. On the other hand, this dissertation investigates a novel technique to prioritize the service to 1) Extensive Read Reused Accessed blocks of the LLC that are silently dropped from higher levels of cache, and 2) the portion of the working set that may exhibit distant re-reference interval in L2. In particular, we develop a lightweight Multi-level Access History Profiler to effciently identify ERRA blocks through aggregating the LLC block addresses tagged with identical Most Signifcant Bits into a single entry. Experimental results indicate that the proposed technique can reduce the L2 read miss ratio by 51.7% on average across PARSEC and SPEC2006 workloads. In addition, this dissertation will broaden and apply advancements in theories of subspace recovery to pioneer computationally-aware in-situ operand reconstruction via the novel Logic In Interconnect (LI2) scheme. LI2 will be developed, validated, and re?ned both theoretically and experimentally to realize a radically different approach to post-Moore\u27s Law computing by leveraging low-rank matrices features offering data reconstruction instead of fetching data from main memory to reduce energy/latency cost per data movement. We propose LI2 enhancement to attain high performance delivery in the post-Moore\u27s Law era through equipping the contemporary micro-architecture design with a customized memory controller which orchestrates the memory request for fetching low-rank matrices to customized Fine Grain Reconfigurable Accelerator (FGRA) for reconstruction while the other memory requests are serviced as before. The goal of LI2 is to conquer the high latency/energy required to traverse main memory arrays in the case of LLC miss, by using in-situ construction of the requested data dealing with low-rank matrices. Thus, LI2 exchanges a high volume of data transfers with a novel lightweight reconstruction method under specific conditions using a cross-layer hardware/algorithm approach

새로운 메모리 기술을 기반으로 한 메모리 시스템 설계 기술

학위논문 (박사)-- 서울대학교 대학원 : 전기·컴퓨터공학부, 2017. 2. 최기영.Performance and energy efficiency of modern computer systems are largely dominated by the memory system. This memory bottleneck has been exacerbated in the past few years with (1) architectural innovations for improving the efficiency of computation units (e.g., chip multiprocessors), which shift the major cause of inefficiency from processors to memory, and (2) the emergence of data-intensive applications, which demands a large capacity of main memory and an excessive amount of memory bandwidth to efficiently handle such workloads. In order to address this memory wall challenge, this dissertation aims at exploring the potential of emerging memory technologies and designing a high-performance, energy-efficient memory hierarchy that is aware of and leverages the characteristics of such new memory technologies. The first part of this dissertation focuses on energy-efficient on-chip cache design based on a new non-volatile memory technology called Spin-Transfer Torque RAM (STT-RAM). When STT-RAM is used to build on-chip caches, it provides several advantages over conventional charge-based memory (e.g., SRAM or eDRAM), such as non-volatility, lower static power, and higher density. However, simply replacing SRAM caches with STT-RAM rather increases the energy consumption because write operations of STT-RAM are slower and more energy-consuming than those of SRAM. To address this challenge, we propose four novel architectural techniques that can alleviate the impact of inefficient STT-RAM write operations on system performance and energy consumption. First, we apply STT-RAM to instruction caches (where write operations are relatively infrequent) and devise a power-gating mechanism called LASIC, which leverages the non-volatility of STT-RAM to turn off STT-RAM instruction caches inside small loops. Second, we propose lower-bits cache, which exploits the narrow bit-width characteristics of application data by caching frequent bit-flips at lower bits in a small SRAM cache. Third, we present prediction hybrid cache, an SRAM/STT-RAM hybrid cache whose block placement between SRAM and STT-RAM is determined by predicting the write intensity of each cache block with a new hardware structure called write intensity predictor. Fourth, we propose DASCA, which predicts write operations that can bypass the cache without incurring extra cache misses (called dead writes) and lets the last-level cache bypass such dead writes to reduce write energy consumption. The second part of this dissertation architects intelligent main memory and its host architecture support based on logic-enabled DRAM. Traditionally, main memory has served the sole purpose of storing data because the extra manufacturing cost of implementing rich functionality (e.g., computation) on a DRAM die was unacceptably high. However, the advent of 3D die stacking now provides a practical, cost-effective way to integrate complex logic circuits into main memory, thereby opening up the possibilities for intelligent main memory. For example, it can be utilized to implement advanced memory management features (e.g., scheduling, power management, etc.) inside memoryit can be also used to offload computation to main memory, which allows us to overcome the memory bandwidth bottleneck caused by narrow off-chip channels (commonly known as processing-in-memory or PIM). The remaining questions are what to implement inside main memory and how to integrate and expose such new features to existing systems. In order to answer these questions, we propose four system designs that utilize logic-enabled DRAM to improve system performance and energy efficiency. First, we utilize the existing logic layer of a Hybrid Memory Cube (a commercial logic-enabled DRAM product) to (1) dynamically turn off some of its off-chip links by monitoring the actual bandwidth demand and (2) integrate prefetch buffer into main memory to perform aggressive prefetching without consuming off-chip link bandwidth. Second, we propose a scalable accelerator for large-scale graph processing called Tesseract, in which graph processing computation is offloaded to specialized processors inside main memory in order to achieve memory-capacity-proportional performance. Third, we design a low-overhead PIM architecture for near-term adoption called PIM-enabled instructions, where PIM operations are interfaced as cache-coherent, virtually-addressed host processor instructions that can be executed either by the host processor or in main memory depending on the data locality. Fourth, we propose an energy-efficient PIM system called aggregation-in-memory, which can adaptively execute PIM operations at any level of the memory hierarchy and provides a fully automated compiler toolchain that transforms existing applications to use PIM operations without programmer intervention.Chapter 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Inefficiencies in the Current Memory Systems 2 1.1.1 On-Chip Caches 2 1.1.2 Main Memory 2 1.2 New Memory Technologies: Opportunities and Challenges 3 1.2.1 Energy-Efficient On-Chip Caches based on STT-RAM 3 1.2.2 Intelligent Main Memory based on Logic-Enabled DRAM 6 1.3 Dissertation Overview 9 Chapter 2 Previous Work 11 2.1 Energy-Efficient On-Chip Caches based on STT-RAM 11 2.1.1 Hybrid Caches 11 2.1.2 Volatile STT-RAM 13 2.1.3 Redundant Write Elimination 14 2.2 Intelligent Main Memory based on Logic-Enabled DRAM 15 2.2.1 PIM Architectures in the 1990s 15 2.2.2 Modern PIM Architectures based on 3D Stacking 15 2.2.3 Modern PIM Architectures on Memory Dies 17 Chapter 3 Loop-Aware Sleepy Instruction Cache 19 3.1 Architecture 20 3.1.1 Loop Cache 21 3.1.2 Loop-Aware Sleep Controller 22 3.2 Evaluation and Discussion 24 3.2.1 Simulation Environment 24 3.2.2 Energy 25 3.2.3 Performance 27 3.2.4 Sensitivity Analysis 27 3.3 Summary 28 Chapter 4 Lower-Bits Cache 29 4.1 Architecture 29 4.2 Experiments 32 4.2.1 Simulator and Cache Model 32 4.2.2 Results 33 4.3 Summary 34 Chapter 5 Prediction Hybrid Cache 35 5.1 Problem and Motivation 37 5.1.1 Problem Definition 37 5.1.2 Motivation 37 5.2 Write Intensity Predictor 38 5.2.1 Keeping Track of Trigger Instructions 39 5.2.2 Identifying Hot Trigger Instructions 40 5.2.3 Dynamic Set Sampling 41 5.2.4 Summary 42 5.3 Prediction Hybrid Cache 43 5.3.1 Need for Write Intensity Prediction 43 5.3.2 Organization 43 5.3.3 Operations 44 5.3.4 Dynamic Threshold Adjustment 45 5.4 Evaluation Methodology 48 5.4.1 Simulator Configuration 48 5.4.2 Workloads 50 5.5 Single-Core Evaluations 51 5.5.1 Energy Consumption and Speedup 51 5.5.2 Energy Breakdown 53 5.5.3 Coverage and Accuracy 54 5.5.4 Sensitivity to Write Intensity Threshold 55 5.5.5 Impact of Dynamic Set Sampling 55 5.5.6 Results for Non-Write-Intensive Workloads 56 5.6 Multicore Evaluations 57 5.7 Summary 59 Chapter 6 Dead Write Prediction Assisted STT-RAM Cache 61 6.1 Motivation 62 6.1.1 Energy Impact of Inefficient Write Operations 62 6.1.2 Limitations of Existing Approaches 63 6.1.3 Potential of Dead Writes 64 6.2 Dead Write Classification 65 6.2.1 Dead-on-Arrival Fills 65 6.2.2 Dead-Value Fills 66 6.2.3 Closing Writes 66 6.2.4 Decomposition 67 6.3 Dead Write Prediction Assisted STT-RAM Cache Architecture 68 6.3.1 Dead Write Prediction 68 6.3.2 Bidirectional Bypass 71 6.4 Evaluation Methodology 72 6.4.1 Simulation Configuration 72 6.4.2 Workloads 74 6.5 Evaluation for Single-Core Systems 75 6.5.1 Energy Consumption and Speedup 75 6.5.2 Coverage and Accuracy 78 6.5.3 Sensitivity to Signature 78 6.5.4 Sensitivity to Update Policy 80 6.5.5 Implications of Device-/Circuit-Level Techniques for Write Energy Reduction 80 6.5.6 Impact of Prefetching 80 6.6 Evaluation for Multi-Core Systems 81 6.6.1 Energy Consumption and Speedup 81 6.6.2 Application to Inclusive Caches 83 6.6.3 Application to Three-Level Cache Hierarchy 84 6.7 Summary 85 Chapter 7 Link Power Management for Hybrid Memory Cubes 87 7.1 Background and Motivation 88 7.1.1 Hybrid Memory Cube 88 7.1.2 Motivation 89 7.2 HMC Link Power Management 91 7.2.1 Link Delay Monitor 91 7.2.2 Power State Transition 94 7.2.3 Overhead 95 7.3 Two-Level Prefetching 95 7.4 Application to Multi-HMC Systems 97 7.5 Experiments 98 7.5.1 Methodology 98 7.5.2 Link Energy Consumption and Speedup 100 7.5.3 HMC Energy Consumption 102 7.5.4 Runtime Behavior of LPM 102 7.5.5 Sensitivity to Slowdown Threshold 104 7.5.6 LPM without Prefetching 104 7.5.7 Impact of Prefetching on Link Traffic 105 7.5.8 On-Chip Prefetcher Aggressiveness in 2LP 107 7.5.9 Tighter Off-Chip Bandwidth Margin 107 7.5.10 Multithreaded Workloads 108 7.5.11 Multi-HMC Systems 109 7.6 Summary 111 Chapter 8 Tesseract PIM System for Parallel Graph Processing 113 8.1 Background and Motivation 115 8.1.1 Large-Scale Graph Processing 115 8.1.2 Graph Processing on Conventional Systems 117 8.1.3 Processing-in-Memory 118 8.2 Tesseract Architecture 119 8.2.1 Overview 119 8.2.2 Remote Function Call via Message Passing 122 8.2.3 Prefetching 124 8.2.4 Programming Interface 126 8.2.5 Application Mapping 127 8.3 Evaluation Methodology 128 8.3.1 Simulation Configuration 128 8.3.2 Workloads 129 8.4 Evaluation Results 130 8.4.1 Performance 130 8.4.2 Iso-Bandwidth Comparison 133 8.4.3 Execution Time Breakdown 134 8.4.4 Prefetch Efficiency 134 8.4.5 Scalability 135 8.4.6 Effect of Higher Off-Chip Network Bandwidth 136 8.4.7 Effect of Better Graph Distribution 137 8.4.8 Energy/Power Consumption and Thermal Analysis 138 8.5 Summary 139 Chapter 9 PIM-Enabled Instructions 141 9.1 Potential of ISA Extensions as the PIM Interface 143 9.2 PIM Abstraction 145 9.2.1 Operations 145 9.2.2 Memory Model 147 9.2.3 Software Modification 148 9.3 Architecture 148 9.3.1 Overview 148 9.3.2 PEI Computation Unit (PCU) 149 9.3.3 PEI Management Unit (PMU) 150 9.3.4 Virtual Memory Support 153 9.3.5 PEI Execution 153 9.3.6 Comparison with Active Memory Operations 154 9.4 Target Applications for Case Study 155 9.4.1 Large-Scale Graph Processing 155 9.4.2 In-Memory Data Analytics 156 9.4.3 Machine Learning and Data Mining 157 9.4.4 Operation Summary 157 9.5 Evaluation Methodology 158 9.5.1 Simulation Configuration 158 9.5.2 Workloads 159 9.6 Evaluation Results 159 9.6.1 Performance 160 9.6.2 Sensitivity to Input Size 163 9.6.3 Multiprogrammed Workloads 164 9.6.4 Balanced Dispatch: Idea and Evaluation 165 9.6.5 Design Space Exploration for PCUs 165 9.6.6 Performance Overhead of the PMU 167 9.6.7 Energy, Area, and Thermal Issues 167 9.7 Summary 168 Chapter 10 Aggregation-in-Memory 171 10.1 Motivation 173 10.1.1 Rethinking PIM for Energy Efficiency 173 10.1.2 Aggregation as PIM Operations 174 10.2 Architecture 176 10.2.1 Overview 176 10.2.2 Programming Model 177 10.2.3 On-Chip Caches 177 10.2.4 Coherence and Consistency 181 10.2.5 Main Memory 181 10.2.6 Potential Generalization Opportunities 183 10.3 Compiler Support 184 10.4 Contributions over Prior Art 185 10.4.1 PIM-Enabled Instructions 185 10.4.2 Parallel Reduction in Caches 187 10.4.3 Row Buffer Locality of DRAM Writes 188 10.5 Target Applications 188 10.6 Evaluation Methodology 190 10.6.1 Simulation Configuration 190 10.6.2 Hardware Overhead 191 10.6.3 Workloads 192 10.7 Evaluation Results 192 10.7.1 Energy Consumption and Performance 192 10.7.2 Dynamic Energy Breakdown 196 10.7.3 Comparison with Aggressive Writeback 197 10.7.4 Multiprogrammed Workloads 198 10.7.5 Comparison with Intrinsic-based Code 198 10.8 Summary 199 Chapter 11 Conclusion 201 11.1 Energy-Efficient On-Chip Caches based on STT-RAM 202 11.2 Intelligent Main Memory based on Logic-Enabled DRAM 203 Bibliography 205 요약 227Docto

A Survey of Techniques for Architecting TLBs

“Translation lookaside buffer” (TLB) caches virtual to physical address translation information and is used in systems ranging from embedded devices to high-end servers. Since TLB is accessed very frequently and a TLB miss is extremely costly, prudent management of TLB is important for improving performance and energy efficiency of processors. In this paper, we present a survey of techniques for architecting and managing TLBs. We characterize the techniques across several dimensions to highlight their similarities and distinctions. We believe that this paper will be useful for chip designers, computer architects and system engineers

비휘발성 메모리 기반의 최종 레벨 캐시를 위한 쓰기 회피 기법

학위논문 (박사)-- 서울대학교 대학원 : 컴퓨터공학부, 2016. 2. 신현식.Non-volatile memory (NVM) is considered to be a promising memory technology for last-level caches (LLC) due to its low leakage of power and high storage density. However, NVM has some drawbacks including high dynamic energy when modifying NVM cells, long latency for write operations, and limited write endurance. To overcome these problems, the thesis focuses on two approaches: cache coherence and NVM capacity management policy for hybrid cache architecture (HCA). First, we review existing cache coherence protocols under the condition of NVM-based LLCs. Our analysis reveals that the LLCs perform unnecessary write operations because legacy protocols have very pay little attention to reducing the number of write accesses to the LLC. Therefore, a write avoidance cache coherence protocol (WACC) is proposed to reduce the number of write operations to the LLC. In addition, novel HCA schemes are proposed to efficiently utilize SRAM in the thesis. Previous studies on HCA have concentrated on detecting write-intensive blocks and placing them into the SRAM ways. However, unlike other studies, a dynamic way adjusting algorithm (DWA) and a linefill-aware cache partitioning (LCP) calculate the optimal size of NVM ways and SRAM ways in order to minimize the NVM write counts and assigning the corresponding number of NVM ways and SRAM ways to cores. The simulation results show that WACC achieves a 13.2% reduction in the dynamic energy consumption. For HCA schemes, the dynamic energy consumption of DWA and LCP is reduced by 26.9% and 37.2%, respectively.I. Introduction 1 1.1 Purpose of the thesis 1 1.2 Background 3 1.3 Motivation 4 1.4 Contributions 5 1.5 Organization of the thesis 8 II. Related work 9 2.1 Hybrid cache architecture 9 2.1.1 Write intensity prediction studies 11 2.1.2 Static approaches 11 2.1.3 Hybrid cache architecture for main memory 12 2.2 Cache partitioning schemes 14 III. Write avoidance cache coherence protocol 15 3.1 Limitation of existing cache coherence protocol 15 3.2 Write avoidance cache coherence protocol 19 IV. NVM capacity management policy for hybrid cache architecture 22 4.1 NVM capacity management policy 22 4.1.1 Concept of NVM capacity management policy 23 4.1.2 Feasibility of NVM capacity management policy 27 4.2 Dynamic way adjusting 37 4.2.1 Maximum stack distance 37 4.2.2 Adjusting the number of NVM ways 41 4.2.3 Algorithm of dynamic way adjusting 42 4.3 Cache partitioning for hybrid cache architecture 46 4.3.1 Linefill-aware cache partitioning 49 4.3.2 Metrics for cache partitioning 50 4.3.3 Algorithm for cache partitioning 59 4.4 Overhead of NVM capacity management policy 68 V. Experimental results 71 5.1 Experimental environment 71 5.2 Write access to NVM 78 5.3 Dynamic energy consumption 85 5.4 Lifetime 90 5.5 Multi-core environment 96 VI. Conclusion 104 6.1 Conclusion 104 6.2 Future work 106 References 107 Abstract in Korean 115Docto

Near-optimal replacement policies for shared caches in multicore processors

An optimal replacement policy that minimizes the miss rate in a private cache was proposed several decades ago. It requires knowing the future access sequence the cache will receive. There is no equivalent for shared caches because replacement decisions alter this future sequence. We present a novel near-optimal policy for minimizing the miss rate in a shared cache that approaches the optimal execution iteratively. During each iteration, the future access sequence is reconstructed on every miss interleaving the future per-core sequences, taken from the previous iteration. This single sequence feeds a classical private-cache optimum replacement policy. Our evaluation on a shared last-level cache shows that our proposal iteratively converges to a near-optimal miss rate that is independent of the initial conditions, within a margin of 0.1%. The best state-of-the-art online policies achieve around 65% of the miss rate reduction obtained by our near-optimal proposal. In a shared cache, miss rate optimization does not imply the optimization of other metrics. Therefore, we also propose a new near-optimal policy to maximize fairness between cores. The best state-of-the-art online policy achieves 60% of the improvement in fairness seen with our near-optimal policy. Our proposals are useful both for setting upper performance bounds and inspiring implementable mechanisms for shared caches.The authors acknowledge support from grants (1) PID2019-105660RB-C21 and PID2019-107255GB-C22 from Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI) from Spain and European Regional Development Fund (ERDF); (2) gaZ: T58_20R research group from Aragón Government and European Social Fund (ESF); and (3) 2014-2020 "Construyendo Europa desde Aragón" from European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft