Data Prefetching on Processors with Heterogeneous MemoryShow others and affiliations
2024 (English)In: MEMSYS 2024 - Proceedings of the International Symposium on Memory Systems, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) , 2024, p. 45-60Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]
Heterogeneous memory architectures, such as a mix of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) and Double Data Rate (DDR), offer flexible performance optimization by leveraging the high bandwidth of HBM along with the high capacity of DDR. However, these architectures present challenges in balancing bandwidth and capacity to maximize overall system performance and complicate hardware design. In a flat memory organization mixing HBM and DDR, prefetchers must carefully reduce prefetch requests on DDR when transitioning from HBM to avoid performance degradation due to potential bandwidth saturation. Traditional hardware prefetchers, which typically assume a homogeneous memory, are unaware of this circumstance, so they may not be effective in heterogeneous memory architectures. The paper enhances the aggressiveness of prefetchers in this kind of architecture. Our technique enables a prefetcher to dynamically determine the optimal prefetch degree and distance based on memory type. It balances prefetch aggressiveness and timeliness through an adaptive strategy informed by bandwidth utilization and prefetch metrics learned for each memory type. We evaluated the technique within the Stride and Stream Prefetchers at L2 in a gem5 model of a 20-core Arm Neoverse V1-like architecture, a mix of HBM2 and DDR5. The simulation results, focusing on scientific benchmarks, showed that the technique effectively guides prefetchers to near-optimal static configurations. On HBM2, the adaptation strategy detects bandwidth availability and prefetches more aggressively to boost performance, achieving speedups of 1.3× to 2.3×. On DDR5, when faced with saturated bandwidth contention, the adaptation strategy switches to conservative prefetching mode to mitigate performance degradation.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) , 2024. p. 45-60
Keywords [en]
Hardware Prefetcher, Hybrid Memory, NUMA
National Category
Computer Systems Computer Engineering
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-359656DOI: 10.1145/3695794.3695800ISI: 001426613200006Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85216078744OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kth-359656DiVA, id: diva2:1935400
Conference
10th International Symposium on Memory Systems, MEMSYS 2024, Washington, United States of America, Sep 30 2024 - Oct 3 2024
Note
Part of ISBN 9798400710919
QC 20250206
2025-02-062025-02-062025-12-08Bibliographically approved