Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Meswani, Mitesh R.
• Blagodurov, Sergey
• Roberts, David
• Slice, John
• Ignatowski, Mike
• Loh, Gabriel H.

Titel

Heterogeneous memory architectures: A HW/SW approach for mixing die-stacked and off-package memories

Ist Teil von

• 2015 IEEE 21st International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA), 2015, p.126-136

Ort / Verlag

IEEE

Erscheinungsjahr

2015

Link zum Volltext

• IEEE_Xplore

Quelle

IEEE Electronic Library (IEL)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Die-stacked DRAM is a technology that will soon be integrated in high-performance systems. Recent studies have focused on hardware caching techniques to make use of the stacked memory, but these approaches require complex changes to the processor and also cannot leverage the stacked memory to increase the system's overall memory capacity. In this work, we explore the challenges of exposing the stacked DRAM as part of the system's physical address space. This non-uniform access memory (NUMA) styled approach greatly simplifies the hardware and increases the physical memory capacity of the system, but pushes the burden of managing the heterogeneous memory architecture (HMA) to the software layers. We first explore simple (and somewhat impractical) schemes to manage the HMA, and then refine the mechanisms to address a variety of hardware and software implementation challenges. In the end, we present an HMA approach with low hardware and software impact that can dynamically tune itself to different application scenarios, achieving performance even better than the (impractical-to-implement) baseline approaches.