The BSC project titled “Performance, power and energy impact of Micron’s novel HPC memory systems: Hardware simulation and performance modelling” has been awarded in the sixth edition of the 2020 HiPEAC Tech Transfer Awards. In collaboration with the industry leader in innovative memory and storage solutions Micron Technology Inc., BSC experts quantified the impact of novel memory devices on the overall performance, power and energy consumption of high-performance computing (HPC) systems.
In particular, BSC provided its expertise in HPC system production use, HPC applications, system simulation and performance analysis to quantify potential benefits of Micron’s novel memory system solutions. These solutions include various memory technologies, packaging and interfaces that could influence future memory industrial standards.
Petar Radojkovic, one of the BSC researchers who has been recognised with this award, together with Pouya Esmaili-Dokht and Xavier Martorell (BSC), Paolo Amato and Jason Adlard (Micron), explains that “Quantifying the impact of novel memory devices on the overall system performance, power and energy consumption is one of the most important challenges of modern computer architecture. The aim of the bilateral sponsored research agreement with Micron is to evaluate and enhance Micron’s high-end and emerging memory technologies even before they are incorporated into production HPC systems.”
The memory system is a major contributor to the deployment and operational costs of a large-scale high-performance computing (HPC) cluster and in terms of system performance it is one of the most critical aspects of the system’s design. For decades, most server and HPC cluster memory systems have been based on DRAM DIMMs. However, it is becoming questionable whether DRAM DIMMs will continue to scale and meet the industry’s demand for high performance and high capacity memory. Significant effort is therefore being invested into the research and development of future memory systems.
BSC started its collaboration with Micron collaboration in 2017 and its aim is to explore novel memory technologies, and efficient design and use of the memory systems based on them.
More information:
HiPEAC Tech Transfer Awards 2020 press release: https://www.hipeac.net/news/6940/winners-of-the-hipeac-tech-transfer-awards-2020/
Related publications:
Milan Radulovic, Rommel Sánchez Verdejo, Paul Carpenter, Petar Radojković, Bruce Jacob, Eduard Ayguadé. "PROFET: Modeling System Performance and Energy Without Simulating the CPU". In Journal Proceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems (SIGMETRICS). Volume 3, Issue 2, June 2019.
Rommel Sánchez Verdejo, Petar Radojković. "Microbenchmarks for Detailed Validation and Tuning of Hardware Simulators". In Proceedings of the International Conference on High Performance Computing and Simulation (HPCS). Genoa, Italy. September 2017.