With the onset of the TECTONIC project, we started working on thermal properties of the registers built in state-of-the-art FinFET technology nodes. We investigated the thermal properties of FinFET based cores, caches, and registers and established relationships between data accesses and hotspots, by executing a set of benchmark applications in our simulation framework. and outcomes of this investigation are published in Computing Frontiers 2022 conference. We also started investigating non-volatile memory (NVM) based cache. We focused on the NVMs, like STT-RAM and ReRAM, for our investigation, due to their promising features over other NVMs. We started exploring the write related issues of the STT-RAM and realized the necessity of dynamic swapping of the cache blocks between the cache sets. Moreover, the relation between temperature, write endurance, retention time, device lifetime have also been investigated. The preliminary results are published in ASAP 2021 conference, whereas the detailed version of this work is still under review. Our comprehensive analysis includes a detailed design space exploration based on thermal analysis of the STT-RAM’s fundamental properties, along with the mitigation. We have also investigated the write issues in STT-RAM based multi-retention cache for heterogeneous systems. Preliminary results have been accepted for a publication in DAC 2023. A followup publication that will include a comprehensive thermal analysis of STT-RAM cache is in the final preparations. For ReRAM caches, we are currently working to develop a power-performance-thermal simulation framework which is already developed and is undergoing final verification for correctness. On completion of the verification process, the simulation framework will be released as an open-source tool for public use. We are developing a loop-splitting technique to overcome write limitations of NVM based caches, where write intensive data will be segregated at the compilation level, and will be placed in the appropriate retention zone by employing linker and cache controller together.
Publications:
1. Sukarn Agarwal, Shounak Chakraborty, Magnus Själander, “Architecting Selective Refresh based Multi-Retention Cache for Heterogeneous System (ARMOUR)”, DAC 2023. (accepted)
2. Sangeet Saha, Shounak Chakraborty, Sukarn Agarwal, Rahul Gangopadhyay, Magnus Själander, Klaus D. McDonald-Maier, “DELICIOUS: Deadline-Aware Approximate Computing in Cache-Conscious Multicore.” IEEE TPDS, 2023.
3. Shounak Chakraborty, Vassos Soteriou, Magnus Själander, “STIFF: Thermally Safe Temperature Effect Inversion aware FinFET based Multi-core”, CF 2022.
4. Yanshul Sharma, Sanjay Moulik, Shounak Chakraborty, “RESTORE: Real-Time Task Scheduling on a Temperature Aware FinFET based Multicore” DATE, 2022.
5. Yanshul Sharma, Shounak Chakraborty, Sanjay Moulik, “ETA-HP: an energy and temperature-aware real-time scheduler for heterogeneous platforms” Journal of Supercomputing, 2022.
6. Sangeet Saha, Shounak Chakraborty, Xiaojun Zhai, Shoaib Ehsan, Klaus D. McDonald-Maier, “ACCURATE: Accuracy Maximization for Real-Time Multicore Systems With Energy-Efficient Way-Sharing Caches” IEEE TCAD, 2022.
7. Sukarn Agarwal, Shounak Chakraborty, “ABACa: Access Based Allocation on Set Wise Multi-Retention in STT-RAM Last Level Cache”, ASAP 2021.
8. Shounak Chakraborty, Magnus Själander, “WaFFLe: Gated Cache-Ways with Per-Core Fine-Grained DVFS for Reduced On-Chip Temperature and Leakage Consumption.” ACM TACO 2021.
9. Shounak Chakraborty, Sangeet Saha, Magnus Själander, Klaus D. McDonald-Maier, “Prepare: Power-Aware Approximate Real-time Task Scheduling for Energy-Adaptive QoS Maximization” ACM TECS, 2021.