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  4. DRAF: A Low-Power DRAM-based Reconfigurable Acceleration Fabric
 
conference paper

DRAF: A Low-Power DRAM-based Reconfigurable Acceleration Fabric

Gao, Mingyu
•
Delimitrou, Christina
•
Niu, Dimin
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2016
2016 Acm/Ieee 43Rd Annual International Symposium On Computer Architecture (Isca)
43rd ACM/IEEE Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA)

FPGAs are a popular target for application-specific accelerators because they lead to a good balance between flexibility and energy efficiency. However, FPGA lookup tables introduce significant area and power overheads, making it difficult to use FPGA devices in environments with tight cost and power constraints. This is the case for datacenter servers, where a modestly-sized FPGA cannot accommodate the large number of diverse accelerators that datacenter applications need. This paper introduces DRAF, an architecture for bit-level reconfigurable logic that uses DRAM subarrays to implement dense lookup tables. DRAF overlaps DRAM operations like bitline precharge and charge restoration with routing within the reconfigurable routing fabric to minimize the impact of DRAM latency. It also supports multiple configuration contexts that can be used to quickly switch between different accelerators with minimal latency. Overall, DRAF trades off some of the performance of FPGAs for significant gains in area and power. DRAF improves area density by 10x over FPGAs and power consumption by more than 3x, enabling DRAF to satisfy demanding applications within strict power and cost constraints. While accelerators mapped to DRAF are 2-3x slower than those in FPGAs, they still deliver a 13x speedup and an 11x reduction in power consumption over a Xeon core for a wide range of datacenter tasks, including analytics and interactive services like speech recognition.

  • Details
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Type
conference paper
DOI
10.1109/Isca.2016.51
Web of Science ID

WOS:000389548600041

Author(s)
Gao, Mingyu
Delimitrou, Christina
Niu, Dimin
Malladi, Krishna T.
Zheng, Hongzhong
Brennan, Bob
Kozyrakis, Christos  
Date Issued

2016

Publisher

Ieee

Publisher place

New York

Published in
2016 Acm/Ieee 43Rd Annual International Symposium On Computer Architecture (Isca)
ISBN of the book

978-1-4673-8947-1

Total of pages

13

Series title/Series vol.

Conference Proceedings Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture

Start page

506

End page

518

Subjects

DRAM

•

reconfigurable logic

•

FPGA

•

low-power

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
SAIL  
Event nameEvent placeEvent date
43rd ACM/IEEE Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA)

Seoul, SOUTH KOREA

JUN 18-22, 2016

Available on Infoscience
January 24, 2017
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/133286
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