121 research outputs found
Flexible-Latency DRAM: Understanding and Exploiting Latency Variation in Modern DRAM Chips
This article summarizes key results of our work on experimental
characterization and analysis of latency variation and latency-reliability
trade-offs in modern DRAM chips, which was published in SIGMETRICS 2016, and
examines the work's significance and future potential.
The goal of this work is to (i) experimentally characterize and understand
the latency variation across cells within a DRAM chip for these three
fundamental DRAM operations, and (ii) develop new mechanisms that exploit our
understanding of the latency variation to reliably improve performance. To this
end, we comprehensively characterize 240 DRAM chips from three major vendors,
and make six major new observations about latency variation within DRAM.
Notably, we find that (i) there is large latency variation across the cells for
each of the three operations; (ii) variation characteristics exhibit
significant spatial locality: slower cells are clustered in certain regions of
a DRAM chip; and (iii) the three fundamental operations exhibit different
reliability characteristics when the latency of each operation is reduced.
Based on our observations, we propose Flexible-LatencY DRAM (FLY-DRAM), a
mechanism that exploits latency variation across DRAM cells within a DRAM chip
to improve system performance. The key idea of FLY-DRAM is to exploit the
spatial locality of slower cells within DRAM, and access the faster DRAM
regions with reduced latencies for the fundamental operations. Our evaluations
show that FLY-DRAM improves the performance of a wide range of applications by
13.3%, 17.6%, and 19.5%, on average, for each of the three different vendors'
real DRAM chips, in a simulated 8-core system
Reducing DRAM Refresh Overheads with Refresh-Access Parallelism
This article summarizes the idea of "refresh-access parallelism," which was
published in HPCA 2014, and examines the work's significance and future
potential. The overarching objective of our HPCA 2014 paper is to reduce the
significant negative performance impact of DRAM refresh with intelligent memory
controller mechanisms.
To mitigate the negative performance impact of DRAM refresh, our HPCA 2014
paper proposes two complementary mechanisms, DARP (Dynamic Access Refresh
Parallelization) and SARP (Subarray Access Refresh Parallelization). The goal
is to address the drawbacks of state-of-the-art per-bank refresh mechanism by
building more efficient techniques to parallelize refreshes and accesses within
DRAM. First, instead of issuing per-bank refreshes in a round-robin order, as
it is done today, DARP issues per-bank refreshes to idle banks in an
out-of-order manner. Furthermore, DARP proactively schedules refreshes during
intervals when a batch of writes are draining to DRAM. Second, SARP exploits
the existence of mostly-independent subarrays within a bank. With minor
modifications to DRAM organization, it allows a bank to serve memory accesses
to an idle subarray while another subarray is being refreshed. Our extensive
evaluations on a wide variety of workloads and systems show that our mechanisms
improve system performance (and energy efficiency) compared to three
state-of-the-art refresh policies, and their performance bene ts increase as
DRAM density increases.Comment: 9 pages. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1712.07754,
arXiv:1601.0635
Errors in Flash-Memory-Based Solid-State Drives: Analysis, Mitigation, and Recovery
NAND flash memory is ubiquitous in everyday life today because its capacity
has continuously increased and cost has continuously decreased over decades.
This positive growth is a result of two key trends: (1) effective process
technology scaling; and (2) multi-level (e.g., MLC, TLC) cell data coding.
Unfortunately, the reliability of raw data stored in flash memory has also
continued to become more difficult to ensure, because these two trends lead to
(1) fewer electrons in the flash memory cell floating gate to represent the
data; and (2) larger cell-to-cell interference and disturbance effects. Without
mitigation, worsening reliability can reduce the lifetime of NAND flash memory.
As a result, flash memory controllers in solid-state drives (SSDs) have become
much more sophisticated: they incorporate many effective techniques to ensure
the correct interpretation of noisy data stored in flash memory cells.
In this chapter, we review recent advances in SSD error characterization,
mitigation, and data recovery techniques for reliability and lifetime
improvement. We provide rigorous experimental data from state-of-the-art MLC
and TLC NAND flash devices on various types of flash memory errors, to motivate
the need for such techniques. Based on the understanding developed by the
experimental characterization, we describe several mitigation and recovery
techniques, including (1) cell-tocell interference mitigation; (2) optimal
multi-level cell sensing; (3) error correction using state-of-the-art
algorithms and methods; and (4) data recovery when error correction fails. We
quantify the reliability improvement provided by each of these techniques.
Looking forward, we briefly discuss how flash memory and these techniques could
evolve into the future.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1706.0864
Adaptive-Latency DRAM: Reducing DRAM Latency by Exploiting Timing Margins
This paper summarizes the idea of Adaptive-Latency DRAM (AL-DRAM), which was
published in HPCA 2015, and examines the work's significance and future
potential. AL-DRAM is a mechanism that optimizes DRAM latency based on the DRAM
module and the operating temperature, by exploiting the extra margin that is
built into the DRAM timing parameters. DRAM manufacturers provide a large
margin for the timing parameters as a provision against two worst-case
scenarios. First, due to process variation, some outlier DRAM chips are much
slower than others. Second, chips become slower at higher temperatures. The
timing parameter margin ensures that the slow outlier chips operate reliably at
the worst-case temperature, and hence leads to a high access latency.
Using an FPGA-based DRAM testing platform, our work first characterizes the
extra margin for 115 DRAM modules from three major manufacturers. The
experimental results demonstrate that it is possible to reduce four of the most
critical timing parameters by a minimum/maximum of 17.3%/54.8% at 55C while
maintaining reliable operation. AL-DRAM uses these observations to adaptively
select reliable DRAM timing parameters for each DRAM module based on the
module's current operating conditions. AL-DRAM does not require any changes to
the DRAM chip or its interface; it only requires multiple different timing
parameters to be specified and supported by the memory controller. Our real
system evaluations show that AL-DRAM improves the performance of
memory-intensive workloads by an average of 14% without introducing any errors.
Our characterization and proposed techniques have inspired several other works
on analyzing and/or exploiting different sources of latency and performance
variation within DRAM chips.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1603.0845
Adaptive-Latency DRAM (AL-DRAM)
This paper summarizes the idea of Adaptive-Latency DRAM (AL-DRAM), which was
published in HPCA 2015. The key goal of AL-DRAM is to exploit the extra margin
that is built into the DRAM timing parameters to reduce DRAM latency. The key
observation is that the timing parameters are dictated by the worst-case
temperatures and worst-case DRAM cells, both of which lead to small amount of
charge storage and hence high access latency. One can therefore reduce latency
by adapting the timing parameters to the current operating temperature and the
current DIMM that is being accessed. Using an FPGA-based testing platform, our
work first characterizes the extra margin for 115 DRAM modules from three major
manufacturers. The experimental results demonstrate that it is possible to
reduce four of the most critical timing parameters by a minimum/maximum of
17.3%/54.8% at 55C while maintaining reliable operation. AL-DRAM adaptively
selects between multiple different timing parameters for each DRAM module based
on its current operating condition. AL-DRAM does not require any changes to the
DRAM chip or its interface; it only requires multiple different timing
parameters to be specified and supported by the memory controller. Real system
evaluations show that AL-DRAM improves the performance of memory-intensive
workloads by an average of 14% without introducing any errors.Comment: This is a summary of the original paper, entitled "Adaptive-Latency
DRAM: Optimizing DRAM Timing for the Common-Case" which appears in HPCA 201
Exploiting Row-Level Temporal Locality in DRAM to Reduce the Memory Access Latency
This paper summarizes the idea of ChargeCache, which was published in HPCA
2016 [51], and examines the work's significance and future potential. DRAM
latency continues to be a critical bottleneck for system performance. In this
work, we develop a low-cost mechanism, called ChargeCache, that enables faster
access to recently-accessed rows in DRAM, with no modifications to DRAM chips.
Our mechanism is based on the key observation that a recently-accessed row has
more charge and thus the following access to the same row can be performed
faster. To exploit this observation, we propose to track the addresses of
recently-accessed rows in a table in the memory controller. If a later DRAM
request hits in that table, the memory controller uses lower timing parameters,
leading to reduced DRAM latency. Row addresses are removed from the table after
a specified duration to ensure rows that have leaked too much charge are not
accessed with lower latency. We evaluate ChargeCache on a wide variety of
workloads and show that it provides significant performance and energy benefits
for both single-core and multi-core systems.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1609.0723
Irregular-Mapped Protograph LDPC-Coded Modulation: A Bandwidth-Efficient Solution for G Networks with Massive Data-Storage Requirement
The huge amount of data produced in the fifth-generation (5G) networks not
only brings new challenges to the reliability and efficiency of mobile devices
but also drives rapid development of new storage techniques. With the benefits
of fast access speed and high reliability, NAND flash memory has become a
promising storage solution for the 5G networks. In this paper, we investigate a
protograph-coded bit-interleaved coded modulation with iterative detection and
decoding (BICM-ID) utilizing irregular mapping (IM) in the multi-level-cell
(MLC) NAND flash-memory systems. First, we propose an enhanced protograph-based
extrinsic information transfer (EPEXIT) algorithm to facilitate the analysis of
protograph codes in the IM-BICM-ID systems. With the use of EPEXIT algorithm, a
simple design method is conceived for the construction of a family of high-rate
protograph codes, called irregular-mapped accumulate-repeat-accumulate (IMARA)
codes, which possess both excellent decoding thresholds and
linear-minimum-distance-growth property. Furthermore, motivated by the
voltage-region iterative gain characteristics of IM-BICM-ID systems, a novel
read-voltage optimization scheme is developed to acquire accurate read-voltage
levels, thus minimizing the decoding thresholds of protograph codes.
Theoretical analyses and error-rate simulations indicate that the proposed
IMARA-aided IM-BICM-ID scheme and the proposed read-voltage optimization scheme
remarkably improve the convergence and decoding performance of flash-memory
systems. Thus, the proposed protograph-coded IM-BICM-ID flash-memory systems
can be viewed as a reliable and efficient storage solution for the
new-generation mobile networks with massive data-storage requirement.Comment: More research effort should be made to improve the quality of this
paper with the help of other collegues. The paper must be withdrawed at this
stage as some content should be revised and change
RowHammer: A Retrospective
This retrospective paper describes the RowHammer problem in Dynamic Random
Access Memory (DRAM), which was initially introduced by Kim et al. at the ISCA
2014 conference~\cite{rowhammer-isca2014}. RowHammer is a prime (and perhaps
the first) example of how a circuit-level failure mechanism can cause a
practical and widespread system security vulnerability. It is the phenomenon
that repeatedly accessing a row in a modern DRAM chip causes bit flips in
physically-adjacent rows at consistently predictable bit locations. RowHammer
is caused by a hardware failure mechanism called {\em DRAM disturbance errors},
which is a manifestation of circuit-level cell-to-cell interference in a scaled
memory technology.
Researchers from Google Project Zero demonstrated in 2015 that this hardware
failure mechanism can be effectively exploited by user-level programs to gain
kernel privileges on real systems. Many other follow-up works demonstrated
other practical attacks exploiting RowHammer. In this article, we
comprehensively survey the scientific literature on RowHammer-based attacks as
well as mitigation techniques to prevent RowHammer. We also discuss what other
related vulnerabilities may be lurking in DRAM and other types of memories,
e.g., NAND flash memory or Phase Change Memory, that can potentially threaten
the foundations of secure systems, as the memory technologies scale to higher
densities. We conclude by describing and advocating a principled approach to
memory reliability and security research that can enable us to better
anticipate and prevent such vulnerabilities.Comment: A version of this work is to appear at IEEE Transactions on
Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD) Special Issue
on Top Picks in Hardware and Embedded Security, 2019. arXiv admin note:
substantial text overlap with arXiv:1703.00626, arXiv:1903.1105
Voltron: Understanding and Exploiting the Voltage-Latency-Reliability Trade-Offs in Modern DRAM Chips to Improve Energy Efficiency
This paper summarizes our work on experimental characterization and analysis
of reduced-voltage operation in modern DRAM chips, which was published in
SIGMETRICS 2017, and examines the work's significance and future potential.
We take a comprehensive approach to understanding and exploiting the latency
and reliability characteristics of modern DRAM when the DRAM supply voltage is
lowered below the nominal voltage level specified by DRAM standards. We perform
an experimental study of 124 real DDR3L (low-voltage) DRAM chips manufactured
recently by three major DRAM vendors. We find that reducing the supply voltage
below a certain point introduces bit errors in the data, and we comprehensively
characterize the behavior of these errors. We discover that these errors can be
avoided by increasing the latency of three major DRAM operations (activation,
restoration, and precharge). We perform detailed DRAM circuit simulations to
validate and explain our experimental findings. We also characterize the
various relationships between reduced supply voltage and error locations,
stored data patterns, DRAM temperature, and data retention.
Based on our observations, we propose a new DRAM energy reduction mechanism,
called Voltron. The key idea of Voltron is to use a performance model to
determine by how much we can reduce the supply voltage without introducing
errors and without exceeding a user-specified threshold for performance loss.
Our evaluations show that Voltron reduces the average DRAM and system energy
consumption by 10.5% and 7.3%, respectively, while limiting the average system
performance loss to only 1.8%, for a variety of memory-intensive quad-core
workloads. We also show that Voltron significantly outperforms prior dynamic
voltage and frequency scaling mechanisms for DRAM
Experimental Characterization, Optimization, and Recovery of Data Retention Errors in MLC NAND Flash Memory
This paper summarizes our work on experimentally characterizing, mitigating,
and recovering data retention errors in multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash
memory, which was published in HPCA 2015, and examines the work's significance
and future potential. Retention errors, caused by charge leakage over time, are
the dominant source of flash memory errors. Understanding, characterizing, and
reducing retention errors can significantly improve NAND flash memory
reliability and endurance. In this work, we first characterize, with real 2Y-nm
MLC NAND flash chips, how the threshold voltage distribution of flash memory
changes with different retention ages -- the length of time since a flash cell
was programmed. We observe from our characterization results that 1) the
optimal read reference voltage of a flash cell, using which the data can be
read with the lowest raw bit error rate (RBER), systematically changes with its
retention age, and 2) different regions of flash memory can have different
retention ages, and hence different optimal read reference voltages.
Based on our findings, we propose two new techniques. First, Retention
Optimized Reading (ROR) adaptively learns and applies the optimal read
reference voltage for each flash memory block online. The key idea of ROR is to
periodically learn a tight upper bound of the optimal read reference voltage,
and from there approach the optimal read reference voltage. Our evaluations
show that ROR can extend flash memory lifetime by 64% and reduce average error
correction latency by 10.1%. Second, Retention Failure Recovery (RFR) recovers
data with uncorrectable errors offline by identifying and probabilistically
correcting flash cells with retention errors. Our evaluation shows that RFR
essentially doubles the error correction capability
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