Repository logo

Infoscience

  • English
  • French
Log In
Logo EPFL, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne

Infoscience

  • English
  • French
Log In
  1. Home
  2. Academic and Research Output
  3. EPFL thesis
  4. Memory Systems and Interconnects for Scale-Out Servers
 
doctoral thesis

Memory Systems and Interconnects for Scale-Out Servers

Volos, Stavros  
2015

The information revolution of the last decade has been fueled by the digitization of almost all human activities through a wide range of Internet services. The backbone of this information age are scale-out datacenters that need to collect, store, and process massive amounts of data. These datacenters distribute vast datasets across a large number of servers, typically into memory-resident shards so as to maintain strict quality-of-service guarantees. While data is driving the skyrocketing demands for scale-out servers, processor and memory manufacturers have reached fundamental efficiency limits, no longer able to increase server energy efficiency at a sufficient pace. As a result, energy has emerged as the main obstacle to the scalability of information technology (IT) with huge economic implications. Delivering sustainable IT calls for a paradigm shift in computer system design. As memory has taken a central role in IT infrastructure, memory-centric architectures are required to fully utilize the IT's costly memory investment. In response, processor architects are resorting to manycore architectures to leverage the abundant request-level parallelism found in data-centric applications. Manycore processors fully utilize available memory resources, thereby increasing IT efficiency by almost an order of magnitude. Because manycore server chips execute a large number of concurrent requests, they exhibit high incidence of accesses to the last-level-cache for fetching instructions (due to large instruction footprints), and off-chip memory (due to lack of temporal reuse in on-chip caches) for accessing dataset objects. As a result, on-chip interconnects and the memory system are emerging as major performance and energy-efficiency bottlenecks in servers. This thesis seeks to architect on-chip interconnects and memory systems that are tuned for the requirements of memory-centric scale-out servers. By studying a wide range of data-centric applications, we uncover application phenomena common in data-centric applications, and examine their implications on on-chip network and off-chip memory traffic. Finally, we propose specialized on-chip interconnects and memory systems that leverage common traffic characteristics, thereby improving server throughput and energy efficiency.

  • Files
  • Details
  • Metrics
Type
doctoral thesis
DOI
10.5075/epfl-thesis-6682
Author(s)
Volos, Stavros  
Advisors
Falsafi, Babak  
Jury

Prof. Willy Zwaenepoel (président) ; Prof. Babak Falsafi (directeur de thèse) ; Prof. Paolo Ienne, Prof. Rajeev Balasubramonian, Prof. Yuan Xie (rapporteurs)

Date Issued

2015

Publisher

EPFL

Publisher place

Lausanne

Public defense year

2015-09-18

Thesis number

6682

Total of pages

134

Subjects

cloud

•

scale-out

•

datacenters

•

interconnects

•

memory systems

•

DRAM

EPFL units
PARSA  
Faculty
IC  
School
ISIM  
Doctoral School
EDIC  
Available on Infoscience
September 8, 2015
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/117700
Logo EPFL, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne
  • Contact
  • infoscience@epfl.ch

  • Follow us on Facebook
  • Follow us on Instagram
  • Follow us on LinkedIn
  • Follow us on X
  • Follow us on Youtube
AccessibilityLegal noticePrivacy policyCookie settingsEnd User AgreementGet helpFeedback

Infoscience is a service managed and provided by the Library and IT Services of EPFL. © EPFL, tous droits réservés