Rank-Aware Dynamic Migrations and Adaptive Demotions for DRAM Power Management

Yanchao Lu, Donghong Wu, Bingsheng He*, Xueyan Tang, Jianliang Xu, Minyi Guo

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articlepeer-review

15 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Modern DRAM architectures allow a number of low-power states on individual memory ranks for advanced power management. Many previous studies have taken advantage of demotions on low-power states for energy saving. However, most of the demotion schemes are statically performed on a limited number of pre-selected low-power states, and are suboptimal for different workloads and memory architectures. Even worse, the idle periods are often too short for effective power state transitions, especially for memory intensive applications. Wrong decisions on power state transition incur significant energy and delay penalties. In this paper, we propose a novel memory system design named RAMZzz with rank-aware energy saving optimizations including dynamic page migrations and adaptive demotions. Specifically, we group the pages with similar access locality into the same rank with dynamic page migrations. Ranks have their hotness: hot ranks are kept busy for high utilization and cold ranks can have more lengthy idle periods for power state transitions. We further develop adaptive state demotions by considering all low-power states for each rank and a prediction model to estimate the power-down timeout among states. We experimentally compare our algorithm with other energy saving policies with cycle-accurate simulation. Experiments with benchmark workloads show that RAMZzz achieves significant improvement on energy-delay 2 and energy consumption over other energy saving techniques.

Original languageEnglish
Article number7056524
Pages (from-to)187-202
Number of pages16
JournalIEEE Transactions on Computers
Volume65
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2016

Scopus Subject Areas

  • Software
  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Computational Theory and Mathematics

User-Defined Keywords

  • Demotion
  • Energy consumption
  • In-memory processing
  • Main memory systems
  • Page migrations

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Rank-Aware Dynamic Migrations and Adaptive Demotions for DRAM Power Management'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this