Evaluation of emerging memory technologies for HPC, data intensive applications

DRAM technology has several shortcomings in terms of performance, energy efficiency and scaling. Several emerging memory technologies have the potential to compensate for the limitations of DRAM when replacing or complementing DRAM in the memory sub-system. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of emerging technologies on HPC and data-intensive workloads modeling a 5-level hybrid memory hierarchy design. Our results show that 1) an additional level of faster DRAM technology (i.e. EDRAM or HMC) interposed between the last level cache and DRAM can improve performance and energy efficiency, 2) a non-volatile main memory (i.e. PCM, STTRAM, or FeRAM) with a small DRAM acting as a cache can reduce the cost and energy consumption at large capacities, and 3) a combination of the two approaches, which essentially replaces the traditional DRAM with a small EDRAM or HMC cache between the last level cache and the non-volatile memory, can grant capacity and improved performance and energy efficiency. We also explore a hybrid DRAM-NVM design with a partitioned address space and find that this approach is marginally beneficial compared to the simpler 5-level design. Finally, we generalize our analysis and show the impact of emerging technologies for a range of latency and energy parameters.

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