In this talk I will present an overview of our research program centered on the main theme of thermal and power awareness in main memory systems. Our ultimate goal is to model, predict, and prevent adverse effects of high operating temperatures in memory systems on the performance and efficiency of the memory system itself as well as on the processor cores that they serve. Some of the techniques we have developed to address thermal issues in memory systems are directly related to physical properties of the underlying system. For instance, we observed that there is a large variation in temperatures of different DRAM chips on a given system: our analysis collected from measurements on a real system indicates that temperatures across DRAM chips can vary by over 10°C. We have designed a variety of hardware and software techniques to minimize this variation as well as the peak DRAM temperature. In the first part of my talk, I will present some of these techniques, which broadly re late to DRAM temperature aware cache management and page allocation. In the second part of my talk, I will highlight some of our ongoing work on mitigating the thermal effects in emerging 3D integration of many-core and main memory chips. A common issue is the large variation of temperature across the 3D structure and its implications on variable performance and leakage power consumption within the global system. Emerging 3D structures require careful tuning of management in all layers of the system stack, where we pay special attention to core-level task management and allocation in our ongoing work.
Bio:
Seda Ogrenci Memik received her BS degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey and her PhD in Computer Science from University of California, Los Angeles. She is currently an Associate Professor at the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of Northwestern University. Her research interests include thermal-aware design and management of high performance system, embedded and reconfigurable computing, and thermal sensing technologies. She received the National Science Foundation Early Career Development (CAREER) Award in 2006. Dr. Ogrenci Memik has served as technical program committee member, organizing committee member, and track chair of several conferences, including ICCAD, DAC, DATE, FPL, GLSVLSI, and ISVLSI and she is currently serving on the Editorial Board of IEEE Transactions on VLSI.