Automatic DRAM Subsystem Configuration with irace

Abstract

Nowadays, DRAM subsystem configuration includes a large number of parameters, resulting in an extensive design space. Setting these parameters is a challenging step in system design as the parameter-workload interactions are complex. Since design space exploration by exhaustive simulation is infeasible due to limited computing resources and development time, semi-automatic configuration involving both manual as well as simulation-based decisions is state-of-the-art. However, it requires a lot of expertise in the DRAM domain as well as application knowledge, and there is no guarantee for a good performance of the resulting subsystem. In this paper, we present a new framework that fully automatizes the DRAM subsystem configuration for a given parameter space and set of target applications. It is based on irace, a software package originally developed for automatic configuration of optimization algorithms. We show that the framework finds nearly-optimal configurations, while only a fraction of all application-configuration combinations has to be evaluated. In addition, all returned configurations perform better than a predefined standard configuration. Thus, our framework enables designers to automatically determine a suitable DRAM subsystem for their platform.