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Juan Gómez Luna

Publications and source records attributed to Juan Gómez Luna.

14 recordsLinked to original sources

RevaMp3D: Architecting the Processor Core and Cache Hierarchy for Systems with Monolithically-Integrated Logic and Memory

Recent nano-technological advances enable the Monolithic 3D (M3D) integration of multiple memory and logic layers in a single chip, allowing for fine-grained connections between layers and significantly alleviating main memory bottlenecks. We show for a variety of workloads, on a state-of-the-art M3D-based system, that the performance and energy bottlenecks shift from main memory to the processor core and cache hierarchy. Therefore, there is a need to revisit current designs that have been conventionally tailored to tackle the memory bottleneck. Based on the insights from our design space exploration, we propose RevaMp3D, introducing five key changes. First, we propose removing the shared last-level cache, as this delivers speedups comparable to or exceeding those from increasing its size or reducing its latency across all workloads. Second, since improving L1 cache latency has a large impact on performance, we reduce L1 latency by leveraging an M3D layout to shorten its wires. Third, we repurpose the area from the removed cache to widen and scale up pipeline structures, accommodating more in-flight requests that are efficiently served by M3D memory. To avoid latency penalties from these larger structures, we leverage M3D layouts. Fourth, to facilitate high thread-level parallelism, we propose a new fine-grained synchronization technique, using M3D's dense inter-layer connectivity. Fifth, we leverage the M3D main memory to mitigate the core bottlenecks. We propose a processor frontend design that memoizes the repetitive fetched, decoded, and reordered instructions, stores them in main memory, and turns off the relevant parts of the core when possible. RevaMp3D provides 1.2x-2.9x speedup and 1.2x-1.4x energy reduction compared to a state-of-the-art M3D system. We also analyze RevaMp3D's design decisions across various memory latencies to facilitate latency-aware design decisions.

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Hardware Acceleration for Knowledge Graph Processing: Challenges & Recent Developments

Knowledge graphs (KGs) have achieved significant attention in recent years, particularly in the area of the Semantic Web as well as gaining popularity in other application domains such as data mining and search engines. Simultaneously, there has been enormous progress in the development of different types of heterogeneous hardware, impacting the way KGs are processed. The aim of this paper is to provide a systematic literature review of knowledge graph hardware acceleration. For this, we present a classification of the primary areas in knowledge graph technology that harnesses different hardware units for accelerating certain knowledge graph functionalities. We then extensively describe respective works, focusing on how KG related schemes harness modern hardware accelerators. Based on our review, we identify various research gaps and future exploratory directions that are anticipated to be of significant value both for academics and industry practitioners.

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ApHMM: Accelerating Profile Hidden Markov Models for Fast and Energy-Efficient Genome Analysis

Profile hidden Markov models (pHMMs) are widely employed in various bioinformatics applications to identify similarities between biological sequences, such as DNA or protein sequences. In pHMMs, sequences are represented as graph structures. These probabilities are subsequently used to compute the similarity score between a sequence and a pHMM graph. The Baum-Welch algorithm, a prevalent and highly accurate method, utilizes these probabilities to optimize and compute similarity scores. However, the Baum-Welch algorithm is computationally intensive, and existing solutions offer either software-only or hardware-only approaches with fixed pHMM designs. We identify an urgent need for a flexible, high-performance, and energy-efficient HW/SW co-design to address the major inefficiencies in the Baum-Welch algorithm for pHMMs. We introduce ApHMM, the first flexible acceleration framework designed to significantly reduce both computational and energy overheads associated with the Baum-Welch algorithm for pHMMs. ApHMM tackles the major inefficiencies in the Baum-Welch algorithm by 1) designing flexible hardware to accommodate various pHMM designs, 2) exploiting predictable data dependency patterns through on-chip memory with memoization techniques, 3) rapidly filtering out negligible computations using a hardware-based filter, and 4) minimizing redundant computations. ApHMM achieves substantial speedups of 15.55x - 260.03x, 1.83x - 5.34x, and 27.97x when compared to CPU, GPU, and FPGA implementations of the Baum-Welch algorithm, respectively. ApHMM outperforms state-of-the-art CPU implementations in three key bioinformatics applications: 1) error correction, 2) protein family search, and 3) multiple sequence alignment, by 1.29x - 59.94x, 1.03x - 1.75x, and 1.03x - 1.95x, respectively, while improving their energy efficiency by 64.24x - 115.46x, 1.75x, 1.96x.

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PiDRAM: A Holistic End-to-end FPGA-based Framework for Processing-in-DRAM

Processing-using-memory (PuM) techniques leverage the analog operation of memory cells to perform computation. Several recent works have demonstrated PuM techniques in off-the-shelf DRAM devices. Since DRAM is the dominant memory technology as main memory in current computing systems, these PuM techniques represent an opportunity for alleviating the data movement bottleneck at very low cost. However, system integration of PuM techniques imposes non-trivial challenges that are yet to be solved. Design space exploration of potential solutions to the PuM integration challenges requires appropriate tools to develop necessary hardware and software components. Unfortunately, current specialized DRAM-testing platforms, or system simulators do not provide the flexibility and/or the holistic system view that is necessary to deal with PuM integration challenges. We design and develop PiDRAM, the first flexible end-to-end framework that enables system integration studies and evaluation of real PuM techniques. PiDRAM provides software and hardware components to rapidly integrate PuM techniques across the whole system software and hardware stack (e.g., necessary modifications in the operating system, memory controller). We implement PiDRAM on an FPGA-based platform along with an open-source RISC-V system. Using PiDRAM, we implement and evaluate two state-of-the-art PuM techniques: in-DRAM (i) copy and initialization, (ii) true random number generation. Our results show that the in-memory copy and initialization techniques can improve the performance of bulk copy operations by 12.6x and bulk initialization operations by 14.6x on a real system. Implementing the true random number generator requires only 190 lines of Verilog and 74 lines of C code using PiDRAM's software and hardware components.

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Venice: Improving Solid-State Drive Parallelism at Low Cost via Conflict-Free Accesses

The performance and capacity of solid-state drives (SSDs) are continuously improving to meet the increasing demands of modern data-intensive applications. Unfortunately, communication between the SSD controller and memory chips (e.g., 2D/3D NAND flash chips) is a critical performance bottleneck for many applications. SSDs use a multi-channel shared bus architecture where multiple memory chips connected to the same channel communicate to the SSD controller with only one path. As a result, path conflicts often occur during the servicing of multiple I/O requests, which significantly limits SSD parallelism. It is critical to handle path conflicts well to improve SSD parallelism and performance. Our goal is to fundamentally tackle the path conflict problem by increasing the number of paths between the SSD controller and memory chips at low cost. To this end, we build on the idea of using an interconnection network to increase the path diversity between the SSD controller and memory chips. We propose Venice, a new mechanism that introduces a low-cost interconnection network between the SSD controller and memory chips and utilizes the path diversity to intelligently resolve path conflicts. Venice employs three key techniques: 1) a simple router chip added next to each memory chip without modifying the memory chip design, 2) a path reservation technique that reserves a path from the SSD controller to the target memory chip before initiating a transfer, and 3) a fully-adaptive routing algorithm that effectively utilizes the path diversity to resolve path conflicts. Our experimental results show that Venice 1) improves performance by an average of 2.65x/1.67x over a baseline performance-optimized/cost-optimized SSD design across a wide range of workloads, 2) reduces energy consumption by an average of 61% compared to a baseline performance-optimized SSD design.

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High-Performance and Scalable Agent-Based Simulation with BioDynaMo

Agent-based modeling plays an essential role in gaining insights into biology, sociology, economics, and other fields. However, many existing agent-based simulation platforms are not suitable for large-scale studies due to the low performance of the underlying simulation engines. To overcome this limitation, we present a novel high-performance simulation engine. We identify three key challenges for which we present the following solutions. First, to maximize parallelization, we present an optimized grid to search for neighbors and parallelize the merging of thread-local results. Second, we reduce the memory access latency with a NUMA-aware agent iterator, agent sorting with a space-filling curve, and a custom heap memory allocator. Third, we present a mechanism to omit the collision force calculation under certain conditions. Our evaluation shows an order of magnitude improvement over Biocellion, three orders of magnitude speedup over Cortex3D and NetLogo, and the ability to simulate 1.72 billion agents on a single server. Supplementary Materials, including instructions to reproduce the results, are available at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6463816

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ALP: Alleviating CPU-Memory Data Movement Overheads in Memory-Centric Systems

Partitioning applications between NDP and host CPU cores causes inter-segment data movement overhead, which is caused by moving data generated from one segment (e.g., instructions, functions) and used in consecutive segments. Prior works take two approaches to this problem. The first class of works maps segments to NDP or host cores based on the properties of each segment, neglecting the inter-segment data movement overhead. The second class of works partitions applications based on the overall memory bandwidth saving of each segment, and does not offload each segment to the best-fitting core if they incur high inter-segment data movement. We show that 1) mapping each segment to its best-fitting core ideally can provide substantial benefits, and 2) the inter-segment data movement reduces this benefit significantly. To this end, we introduce ALP, a new programmer-transparent technique to leverage the performance benefits of NDP by alleviating the inter-segment data movement overhead between host and memory and enabling efficient partitioning of applications. ALP alleviates the inter-segment data movement overhead by proactively and accurately transferring the required data between the segments. This is based on the key observation that the instructions that generate the inter-segment data stay the same across different executions of a program on different inputs. ALP uses a compiler pass to identify these instructions and uses specialized hardware to transfer data between the host and NDP cores at runtime. ALP efficiently maps application segments to either host or NDP considering 1) the properties of each segment, 2) the inter-segment data movement overhead, and 3) whether this overhead can be alleviated in a timely manner. We evaluate ALP across a wide range of workloads and show on average 54.3% and 45.4% speedup compared to only-host CPU or only-NDP executions, respectively.

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A Compiler Framework for Optimizing Dynamic Parallelism on GPUs

Dynamic parallelism on GPUs allows GPU threads to dynamically launch other GPU threads. It is useful in applications with nested parallelism, particularly where the amount of nested parallelism is irregular and cannot be predicted beforehand. However, prior works have shown that dynamic parallelism may impose a high performance penalty when a large number of small grids are launched. The large number of launches results in high launch latency due to congestion, and the small grid sizes result in hardware underutilization. To address this issue, we propose a compiler framework for optimizing the use of dynamic parallelism in applications with nested parallelism. The framework features three key optimizations: thresholding, coarsening, and aggregation. Thresholding involves launching a grid dynamically only if the number of child threads exceeds some threshold, and serializing the child threads in the parent thread otherwise. Coarsening involves executing the work of multiple thread blocks by a single coarsened block to amortize the common work across them. Aggregation involves combining multiple child grids into a single aggregated grid. Our evaluation shows that our compiler framework improves the performance of applications with nested parallelism by a geometric mean of 43.0x over applications that use dynamic parallelism, 8.7x over applications that do not use dynamic parallelism, and 3.6x over applications that use dynamic parallelism with aggregation alone as proposed in prior work.

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BurstLink: Techniques for Energy-Efficient Conventional and Virtual Reality Video Display

Conventional planar video streaming is the most popular application in mobile systems and the rapid growth of 360 video content and virtual reality (VR) devices are accelerating the adoption of VR video streaming. Unfortunately, video streaming consumes significant system energy due to the high power consumption of the system components (e.g., DRAM, display interfaces, and display panel) involved in this process. We propose BurstLink, a novel system-level technique that improves the energy efficiency of planar and VR video streaming. BurstLink is based on two key ideas. First, BurstLink directly transfers a decoded video frame from the host system to the display panel, bypassing the host DRAM. To this end, we extend the display panel with a double remote frame buffer (DRFB), instead of the DRAM's double frame buffer, so that the system can directly update the DRFB with a new frame while updating the panel's pixels with the current frame stored in the DRFB. Second, BurstLink transfers a complete decoded frame to the display panel in a single burst, using the maximum bandwidth of modern display interfaces. Unlike conventional systems where the frame transfer rate is limited by the pixel-update throughput of the display panel, BurstLink can always take full advantage of the high bandwidth of modern display interfaces by decoupling the frame transfer from the pixel update as enabled by the DRFB. This direct and burst frame transfer of BurstLink significantly reduces energy consumption in video display by reducing access to the host DRAM and increasing the system's residency at idle power states. We evaluate BurstLink using an analytical power model that we rigorously validate on a real modern mobile system. Our evaluation shows that BurstLink reduces system energy consumption for 4K planar and VR video streaming by 41% and 33%, respectively.

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SISA: Set-Centric Instruction Set Architecture for Graph Mining on Processing-in-Memory Systems

Simple graph algorithms such as PageRank have been the target of numerous hardware accelerators. Yet, there also exist much more complex graph mining algorithms for problems such as clustering or maximal clique listing. These algorithms are memory-bound and thus could be accelerated by hardware techniques such as Processing-in-Memory (PIM). However, they also come with nonstraightforward parallelism and complicated memory access patterns. In this work, we address this problem with a simple yet surprisingly powerful observation: operations on sets of vertices, such as intersection or union, form a large part of many complex graph mining algorithms, and can offer rich and simple parallelism at multiple levels. This observation drives our cross-layer design, in which we (1) expose set operations using a novel programming paradigm, (2) express and execute these operations efficiently with carefully designed set-centric ISA extensions called SISA, and (3) use PIM to accelerate SISA instructions. The key design idea is to alleviate the bandwidth needs of SISA instructions by mapping set operations to two types of PIM: in-DRAM bulk bitwise computing for bitvectors representing high-degree vertices, and near-memory logic layers for integer arrays representing low-degree vertices. Set-centric SISA-enhanced algorithms are efficient and outperform hand-tuned baselines, offering more than 10x speedup over the established Bron-Kerbosch algorithm for listing maximal cliques. We deliver more than 10 SISA set-centric algorithm formulations, illustrating SISA's wide applicability.

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SIMDRAM: An End-to-End Framework for Bit-Serial SIMD Computing in DRAM

Processing-using-DRAM has been proposed for a limited set of basic operations (i.e., logic operations, addition). However, in order to enable full adoption of processing-using-DRAM, it is necessary to provide support for more complex operations. In this paper, we propose SIMDRAM, a flexible general-purpose processing-using-DRAM framework that (1) enables the efficient implementation of complex operations, and (2) provides a flexible mechanism to support the implementation of arbitrary user-defined operations. The SIMDRAM framework comprises three key steps. The first step builds an efficient MAJ/NOT representation of a given desired operation. The second step allocates DRAM rows that are reserved for computation to the operation's input and output operands, and generates the required sequence of DRAM commands to perform the MAJ/NOT implementation of the desired operation in DRAM. The third step uses the SIMDRAM control unit located inside the memory controller to manage the computation of the operation from start to end, by executing the DRAM commands generated in the second step of the framework. We design the hardware and ISA support for SIMDRAM framework to (1) address key system integration challenges, and (2) allow programmers to employ new SIMDRAM operations without hardware changes. We evaluate SIMDRAM for reliability, area overhead, throughput, and energy efficiency using a wide range of operations and seven real-world applications to demonstrate SIMDRAM's generality. Using 16 DRAM banks, SIMDRAM provides (1) 88x and 5.8x the throughput, and 257x and 31x the energy efficiency, of a CPU and a high-end GPU, respectively, over 16 operations; (2) 21x and 2.1x the performance of the CPU and GPU, over seven real-world applications. SIMDRAM incurs an area overhead of only 0.2% in a high-end CPU.

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IChannels: Exploiting Current Management Mechanisms to Create Covert Channels in Modern Processors

To operate efficiently across a wide range of workloads with varying power requirements, a modern processor applies different current management mechanisms, which briefly throttle instruction execution while they adjust voltage and frequency to accommodate for power-hungry instructions (PHIs) in the instruction stream. Doing so 1) reduces the power consumption of non-PHI instructions in typical workloads and 2) optimizes system voltage regulators' cost and area for the common use case while limiting current consumption when executing PHIs. However, these mechanisms may compromise a system's confidentiality guarantees. In particular, we observe that multilevel side-effects of throttling mechanisms, due to PHI-related current management mechanisms, can be detected by two different software contexts (i.e., sender and receiver) running on 1) the same hardware thread, 2) co-located Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) threads, and 3) different physical cores. Based on these new observations on current management mechanisms, we develop a new set of covert channels, IChannels, and demonstrate them in real modern Intel processors (which span more than 70% of the entire client and server processor market). Our analysis shows that IChannels provides more than 24x the channel capacity of state-of-the-art power management covert channels. We propose practical and effective mitigations to each covert channel in IChannels by leveraging the insights we gain through a rigorous characterization of real systems.

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FIGARO: Improving System Performance via Fine-Grained In-DRAM Data Relocation and Caching

DRAM Main memory is a performance bottleneck for many applications due to the high access latency. In-DRAM caches work to mitigate this latency by augmenting regular-latency DRAM with small-but-fast regions of DRAM that serve as a cache for the data held in the regular-latency region of DRAM. While an effective in-DRAM cache can allow a large fraction of memory requests to be served from a fast DRAM region, the latency savings are often hindered by inefficient mechanisms for relocating copies of data into and out of the fast regions. Existing in-DRAM caches have two sources of inefficiency: (1) the data relocation granularity is an entire multi-kilobyte row of DRAM; and (2) because the relocation latency increases with the physical distance between the slow and fast regions, multiple fast regions are physically interleaved among slow regions to reduce the relocation latency, resulting in increased hardware area and manufacturing complexity. We propose a new substrate, FIGARO, that uses existing shared global buffers among subarrays within a DRAM bank to provide support for in-DRAM data relocation across subarrays at the granularity of a single cache block. FIGARO has a distance-independent latency within a DRAM bank, and avoids complex modifications to DRAM. Using FIGARO, we design a fine-grained in-DRAM cache called FIGCache. The key idea of FIGCache is to cache only small, frequently-accessed portions of different DRAM rows in a designated region of DRAM. By caching only the parts of each row that are expected to be accessed in the near future, we can pack more of the frequently-accessed data into FIGCache, and can benefit from additional row hits in DRAM. Our evaluations show that FIGCache improves the average performance of a system using DDR4 DRAM by 16.3% and reduces average DRAM energy consumption by 7.8% for 8-core workloads, over a conventional system without in-DRAM caching.

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