It is questionable whether DRAM will continue to scale and will meet the needs of next-generation systems. Therefore, significant effort is invested in research and development of novel memory technologies. One of the candidates for next-generation memory is Spin-Transfer Torque Magnetic Random Access Memory (STT-MRAM). STT-MRAM is an emerging non-volatile memory with a lot of potential that could be exploited for various requirements of different computing systems. Being a novel technology, STT-MRAM devices are already approaching DRAM in terms of capacity, frequency, and device size. Although STT-MRAM technology got significant attention of various major memory manufacturers, academic research of STT-MRAM main memory remains marginal. This is mainly due to the unavailability of publicly available detailed timing and current parameters of this novel technology, which are required to perform a reliable main memory simulation on performance and power estimation. This study demonstrates an approach to perform a cycle accurate simulation of STT-MRAM main memory, being the first to release detailed timing and current parameters of this technology from academia—essentially enabling researchers to conduct reliable system-level simulation of STT-MRAM using widely accepted existing simulation infrastructure. The results show a fairly narrow overall performance deviation in response to significant variations in key timing parameters, and the power consumption experiments identify the key power component that is mostly affected with STT-MRAM.
STT-MRAM is a promising new memory technology with very desirable set of properties such as non-volatility, byteaddressability and high endurance. It has the potential to become the universal memory that could be incorporated to all levels of memory hierarchy. Although STT-MRAM technology got significant attention of various major memory manufacturers, to this day, academic research of STT-MRAM main memory remains marginal. This is mainly due to the unavailability of publicly available detailed timing parameters which are required to perform a cycle accurate main memory simulation. Our study presents a detailed analysis of STT-MRAM main memory timing and propose an approach to perform a reliable system level simulation of the memory technology. We seamlessly incorporate STT-MRAM timing parameters into DRAMSim2 memory simulator and use it as a part of the simulation infrastructure of the high-performance computing (HPC) systems. Our results suggests that, STT-MRAM main memory would provide performance comparable to DRAM, while opening up various opportunities for HPC system improvements. Most importantly, our study enables researchers to conduct reliable system level research on STT-MRAM main memory, and to explore the opportunities that this technology has to offer.
Cycle accurate DRAM simulations have been the dominating architecture simulation model for DRAM for a long time. Although accurate, its poor simulation speed has not improved for years while a lot of other architecture simulators such as CPU and cache simulators have moved away from cycle-accurate models for better performance. In this paper, we discuss limitations of cycle-accurate DRAM models, through simulation experiments, we show that cycle-accurate DRAM simulator is becoming a dominant part of overall simulation time when paired with modern CPU simulators. We also demonstrate the inherent inflexibility of cycle-accurate models becomes the roadblock for faster simulation speed and integration with other non-cycle-accurate simulation frameworks. Finally, we discuss alternative modeling techniques for DRAM simulation and point out potential pathways to further DRAM simulation technique. CCS CONCEPTS • Computing methodologies → Modeling methodologies; Massively parallel and high-performance simulations; Simulation evaluation.
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