At the Locus of Performance: Quantifying the Effects of Copious 3D-Stacked Cache on HPC Workloads
Journal article, 2023

Over the last three decades, innovations in the memory subsystem were primarily targeted at overcoming the data movement bottleneck. In this paper, we focus on a specific market trend in memory technology: 3D-stacked memory and caches. We investigate the impact of extending the on-chip memory capabilities in future HPC-focused processors, particularly by 3D-stacked SRAM. First, we propose a method oblivious to the memory subsystem to gauge the upper-bound in performance improvements when data movement costs are eliminated. Then, using the gem5 simulator, we model two variants of a hypothetical LARge Cache processor (LARC), fabricated in 1.5 nm and enriched with high-capacity 3D-stacked cache. With a volume of experiments involving a broad set of proxy-applications and benchmarks, we aim to reveal how HPC CPU performance will evolve, and conclude an average boost of 9.56× for cache-sensitive HPC applications, on a per-chip basis. Additionally, we exhaustively document our methodological exploration to motivate HPC centers to drive their own technological agenda through enhanced co-design.

gem5 simulation

emerging architecture study

proxy-applications

3d-stacked memory

Author

Jens Domke

RIKEN

Emil Vatai

RIKEN

Balazs Gerofi

Intel Corporation

Yuetsu Kodama

RIKEN

Mohamed Wahib

RIKEN

Artur Podobas

Royal Institute of Technology (KTH)

Sparsh Mittal

Indian Institute of Technology

Miquel Pericas

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Computer Engineering (Chalmers)

Lingqi Zhang

Tokyo Institute of Technology

Peng Chen

National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST)

Aleksandr Drozd

RIKEN

Satoshi Matsuoka

RIKEN

Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization

1544-3566 (ISSN) 1544-3973 (eISSN)

Vol. 20 4 57

Areas of Advance

Information and Communication Technology

Subject Categories

Computer Systems

DOI

10.1145/3629520

More information

Latest update

5/30/2024