String Figure: A Scalable and Elastic Memory Network Architecture

Appeared in Proceedings of the 25th International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA 2019).

Abstract

Demand for server memory capacity and performance is rapidly increasing due to expanding working set sizes of modern applications, such as big data analytics, in-memory computing, deep learning, and server virtualization. One promising techniques to tackle this requirements is mem- ory networking, whereby a server memory system consists of multiple 3D die-stacked memory nodes interconnected by a high-speed network. However, current memory network designs face substantial scalability and flexibility challenges. This includes (1) maintaining high throughput and low latency in large-scale memory networks at low hardware cost, (2) efficiently interconnecting an arbitrary number of memory nodes, and (3) supporting flexible memory network scale expansion and reduction without major modification of the memory network design or physical implementation.

To address the challenges, we propose String Figure, a high-throughput, elastic, and scalable memory network architecture. String Figure consists of (1) an algorithm to generate random topologies that achieve high network throughput and near-optimal path lengths in large-scale memory networks, (2) a hybrid routing protocol that employs a mix of computation and look up tables to reduce the overhead of both in routing, (3) a set of network reconfiguration mechanisms that allow both static and dynamic network expansion and reduction. Our experiments using RTL simulation demonstrate that String Figure can interconnect over one thousand memory nodes with a shortest path length within five hops across various traffic patterns and real workloads.

Publication date:
February 2019

Authors:
Matheus Ogleari
Ye Yu
Chen Qian
Ethan L. Miller
Jishen Zhao

Projects:
Storage Class Memories

Available media

Full paper text: PDF

Bibtex entry

@inproceedings{ogleari-hpca19,
  author       = {Matheus Ogleari and Ye Yu and Chen Qian and Ethan L. Miller and Jishen Zhao},
  title        = {String Figure: A Scalable and Elastic Memory Network Architecture},
  booktitle    = {Proceedings of the 25th International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA 2019)},
  month        = feb,
  year         = {2019},
}