Hardware Acceleration is the most sought technique in chip design to achieve better performance and power efficiency for critical functions that may be in-efficiently handled from
traditional OS/software. As technology started advancing with 7nm products already in the
market which can provide better power and performance consuming low area, the latency-critical functions that were handled by software traditionally now started moving as acceleration units in the chip. This thesis describes the accelerator architecture, implementation, and prototype for one of such functions namely "Locality-Aware memory compression" which
is part of the "OS-controlled memory compression" scheme that has been actively deployed in
today's OSes. In brief, OS-controlled memory compression is a new memory management
feature that transparently, dramatically, and adaptively increases effective main memory
capacity on-demand as software-level memory usage increases beyond physical memory system capacity. OS-controlled memory compression has been adopted across almost all OSes
(e.g., Linux, Windows, macOS, AIX) and almost all classes of computing systems (e.g.,
smartphones, PCs, data centers, and cloud). The OS-controlled memory compression scheme
is Locality Aware. But still under OS-controlled memory compression today, applications
experience long-latency page faults when accessing compressed memory. To solve this per-
performance bottle-neck, acceleration technique has been proposed to manage "Locality Aware
Memory compression" within hardware thereby enabling applications to access their OS-
compressed memory directly. This Accelerator is referred to as HALK throughout this work, which stands for "Hardware-accelerated Locality-aware Memory Compression". The literal mean-
ing of the word HALK in English is 'a hidden place'. As such, this accelerator is neither
exposed to the OS nor to the running applications. It is hidden entirely in the memory con-
troller hardware and incurs minimal hardware cost. This thesis work explores developing
FPGA design prototype and gives the proof of concept for the functionality of HALK by
running non-trivial micro-benchmarks. This work also provides and analyses power, performance, and area of HALK for ASIC designs (at technology node of 7nm) and selected FPGA
Prototype design. / Master of Science / Memory capacity has become a scarce resource across many digital computing systems spanning from smartphones to large-scale cloud systems. The slowing improvement of memory capacity per dollar further worsens this problem. To address this, almost all industry-standard OSes like Linux, Windows, macOS, etc implement Memory compression to store more data in the same space. This is handled with software in today's systems which is very inefficient and suffers long latency thus degrading the user responsiveness. Hardware is always faster in performing computations compared to software. So, a solution that is implemented in hardware with the low area and low cost is always preferred as it can provide better performance and power efficiency. In the hardware world, such modules that perform specifically targeted software functions are called accelerators. This thesis shows the work on developing such a hardware accelerator to handle ``Locality Aware Memory Compression" so as to allow the applications to directly access compressed data without OS intervention thereby improving the overall performance of the system. The proposed accelerator is locality aware which means least recently allocated uncompressed page would be picked for compression to free up more space on-demand and most recently allocated page is put into an uncompressed format.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/109091 |
| Date | 09 September 2020 |
| Creators | Srinivas, Raghavendra |
| Contributors | Electrical and Computer Engineering, Patterson, Cameron D., Jian, Xun, Plassmann, Paul E. |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
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