DSM: A Case for Hardware-Assisted Merging of DRAM Rows with Same Content

Seyed Armin Vakil Ghahani, Mahmut Taylan Kandemir, Jagadish B. Kotra

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

The number of cores and the capacities of main memory in modern systems have been growing significantly. Specifically, memory scaling, although at a slower pace than computation scaling, provided opportunities for very large DRAMs with Terabytes (TBs) capacity. Consequently, addressing the performance and energy consumption bottlenecks of DRAMs is more important than ever. DRAM memory refresh operation is one of the main contributing factors to the memory overheads, especially for large capacity DRAMs used in modern servers and emerging large-scale data centers. This paper addresses the memory refresh problem by leveraging the fact that most cloud servers host virtualized systems that use similar kernels, libraries, etc. We propose and experimentally evaluate a novel approach that exploits this observation to address the DRAM refresh overhead in such systems. More specifically, in this work, we present DSM, a light-weight hardware extension in memory controller to detect the pages with same content in memory and refresh only one of them and redirect the requests to the others to this page. Our detailed experimental analysis shows that the proposed DSM design can reduce 99th percentile memory access latency by up to 2.01x, and it also reduces the overall memory energy consumption by up to 8.5%.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationSIGMETRICS Performance 2020 - Abstracts of the 2020 SIGMETRICS/Performance Joint International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages91-92
Number of pages2
ISBN (Electronic)9781450379854
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 8 2020
Event2020 SIGMETRICS/Performance Joint International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems, SIGMETRICS 2020 - Boston, United States
Duration: Jun 8 2020Jun 12 2020

Publication series

NameSIGMETRICS Performance 2020 - Abstracts of the 2020 SIGMETRICS/Performance Joint International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems

Conference

Conference2020 SIGMETRICS/Performance Joint International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems, SIGMETRICS 2020
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityBoston
Period6/8/206/12/20

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Computational Theory and Mathematics

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