Thermal-aware dynamic page allocation policy by future access patterns for Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC)

Abstract

The Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC) is a promising solution to overcome memory wall by stacking DRAM chips on top of a logic die and connecting them with dense and fast Through Silicon Vias (TSVs). However, 3D stacking technique brings another problem: high temperature and temperature variations between the DRAM dies. The thermal problem may lead to chip failure of 3D stacked DRAMs since the temperature may exceed the maximum operating temperature. Dynamic thermal management (DTM) scheme such as bandwidth throttling can effectively decrease the temperature. However, it results in the loss of the performance. To maximize the performance of the system with HMC, the appropriate memory mapping should consider the thermal characteristics of HMC, memory interference and bandwidth variations among processes, and current temperature conditions of each memory channel. This paper proposes a thermal-aware dynamic OS page allocation using future access pattern to find a best performance-oriented setting of the above factors. An analytical model has been proposed to estimate the system performance considering the memory interference, the bandwidth variation, and the throttling impact. Our method can improve the system performance by 12.7% compared to best performance-oriented allocation method (MCP) [1]. The average error rate of our analytical model to predict the trend of performance variations is only 0.86%.