Conference proceeding
VRL-DRAM: Improving DRAM Performance via Variable Refresh Latency
2018 55TH ACM/ESDA/IEEE DESIGN AUTOMATION CONFERENCE (DAC), v 137710, pp 1-6
01 Jan 2018
Abstract
A DRAM chip requires periodic refresh operations to prevent data loss due to charge leakage in DRAM cells. Refresh operations incur significant performance overhead as a DRAM bank/rank becomes unavailable to service access requests while being refreshed. In this work, our goal is to reduce the performance overhead of DRAM refresh by reducing the latency of a refresh operation. We observe that a significant number of DRAM cells can retain their data for longer than the worst-case refresh period of 64ms. Such cells do not always need to be fully refreshed; a low-latency partial refresh is sufficient for them.
We propose Variable Refresh Latency DRAM (VRL-DRAM), a mechanism that fully refreshes a DRAM cell only when necessary, and otherwise ensures data integrity by issuing low-latency partial refresh operations. We develop a new detailed analytical model to estimate the minimum latency of a refresh operation that ensures data integrity of a cell with a given retention time profile. We evaluate VRL-DRAM with memory traces from real workloads, and show that it reduces the average refresh performance overhead by 34% compared to the state-of-the-art approach.
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Details
- Title
- VRL-DRAM: Improving DRAM Performance via Variable Refresh Latency
- Creators
- Anup Das - Drexel UniversityHasan Hassan - ETH Zurich Zurich SwitzerlandOnur Mutlu - ETH Zurich Zurich SwitzerlandIEEE
- Publication Details
- 2018 55TH ACM/ESDA/IEEE DESIGN AUTOMATION CONFERENCE (DAC), v 137710, pp 1-6
- Series
- Design Automation Conference DAC
- Publisher
- IEEE
- Number of pages
- 6
- Resource Type
- Conference proceeding
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Electrical and Computer Engineering
- Web of Science ID
- WOS:000446034500014
- Scopus ID
- 2-s2.0-85053679317
- Other Identifier
- 991019238707504721
InCites Highlights
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- Collaboration types
- Domestic collaboration
- International collaboration
- Web of Science research areas
- Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence
- Computer Science, Hardware & Architecture