Memory Subsystem Optimization Techniques for Modern High-Performance General-Purpose Processors

abstract: General-purpose processors propel the advances and innovations that are the subject of humanity’s many endeavors. Catering to this demand, chip-multiprocessors (CMPs) and general-purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs) have seen many high-performance innovations in their architectures. With these advances, the memory subsystem has become the performance- and energy-limiting aspect of CMPs and GPGPUs alike. This dissertation identifies and mitigates the key performance and energy-efficiency bottlenecks in the memory subsystem of general-purpose processors via novel, practical, microarchitecture and system-architecture solutions. Addressing the important Last Level Cache (LLC) management problem in CMPs, I observe that LLC management decisions made in isolation, as in prior proposals, often lead to sub-optimal system performance. I demonstrate that in order to maximize system performance, it is essential to manage the LLCs while being cognizant of its interaction with the system main memory. I propose ReMAP, which reduces the net memory access cost by evicting cache lines that either have no reuse, or have low memory access cost. ReMAP improves the performance of the CMP system by as much as 13%, and by an average of 6.5%. Rather than the LLC, the L1 data cache has a pronounced impact on GPGPU performance by acting as the bandwidth filter for the rest of the memory subsystem. Prior work has shown that the severely constrained data cache capacity in GPGPUs leads to sub-optimal performance. In this thesis, I propose two novel techniques that address the GPGPU data cache capacity problem. I propose ID-Cache that performs effective cache bypassing and cache line size selection to improve cache capacity utilization. Next, I propose LATTE-CC that considers the GPU’s latency tolerance feature and adaptively compresses the data stored in the data cache, thereby increasing its effective capacity. ID-Cache and LATTE-CC are shown to achieve 71% and 19.2% speedup, respectively, over a wide variety of GPGPU applications. Complementing the aforementioned microarchitecture techniques, I identify the need for system architecture innovations to sustain performance scalability of GPG- PUs in the face of slowing Moore’s Law. I propose a novel GPU architecture called the Multi-Chip-Module GPU (MCM-GPU) that integrates multiple GPU modules to form a single logical GPU. With intelligent memory subsystem optimizations tailored for MCM-GPUs, it can achieve within 7% of the performance of a similar but hypothetical monolithic die GPU. Taking a step further, I present an in-depth study of the energy-efficiency characteristics of future MCM-GPUs. I demonstrate that the inherent non-uniform memory access side-effects form the key energy-efficiency bottleneck in the future. In summary, this thesis offers key insights into the performance and energy-efficiency bottlenecks in CMPs and GPGPUs, which can guide future architects towards developing high-performance and energy-efficient general-purpose processors.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Computer Science 201

Understanding and Improving the Latency of DRAM-Based Memory Systems

Over the past two decades, the storage capacity and access bandwidth of main memory have improved tremendously, by 128x and 20x, respectively. These improvements are mainly due to the continuous technology scaling of DRAM (dynamic random-access memory), which has been used as the physical substrate for main memory. In stark contrast with capacity and bandwidth, DRAM latency has remained almost constant, reducing by only 1.3x in the same time frame. Therefore, long DRAM latency continues to be a critical performance bottleneck in modern systems. Increasing core counts, and the emergence of increasingly more data-intensive and latency-critical applications further stress the importance of providing low-latency memory access. In this dissertation, we identify three main problems that contribute significantly to long latency of DRAM accesses. To address these problems, we present a series of new techniques. Our new techniques significantly improve both system performance and energy efficiency. We also examine the critical relationship between supply voltage and latency in modern DRAM chips and develop new mechanisms that exploit this voltage-latency trade-off to improve energy efficiency. The key conclusion of this dissertation is that augmenting DRAM architecture with simple and low-cost features, and developing a better understanding of manufactured DRAM chips together lead to significant memory latency reduction as well as energy efficiency improvement. We hope and believe that the proposed architectural techniques and the detailed experimental data and observations on real commodity DRAM chips presented in this dissertation will enable development of other new mechanisms to improve the performance, energy efficiency, or reliability of future memory systems.Comment: PhD Dissertatio

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

Power Bounded Computing on Current & Emerging HPC Systems

Power has become a critical constraint for the evolution of large scale High Performance Computing (HPC) systems and commercial data centers. This constraint spans almost every level of computing technologies, from IC chips all the way up to data centers due to physical, technical, and economic reasons. To cope with this reality, it is necessary to understand how available or permissible power impacts the design and performance of emergent computer systems. For this reason, we propose power bounded computing and corresponding technologies to optimize performance on HPC systems with limited power budgets. We have multiple research objectives in this dissertation. They center on the understanding of the interaction between performance, power bounds, and a hierarchical power management strategy. First, we develop heuristics and application aware power allocation methods to improve application performance on a single node. Second, we develop algorithms to coordinate power across nodes and components based on application characteristic and power budget on a cluster. Third, we investigate performance interference induced by hardware and power contentions, and propose a contention aware job scheduling to maximize system throughput under given power budgets for node sharing system. Fourth, we extend to GPU-accelerated systems and workloads and develop an online dynamic performance & power approach to meet both performance requirement and power efficiency. Power bounded computing improves performance scalability and power efficiency and decreases operation costs of HPC systems and data centers. This dissertation opens up several new ways for research in power bounded computing to address the power challenges in HPC systems. The proposed power and resource management techniques provide new directions and guidelines to green exscale computing and other computing systems