R&D: Polling-Based Memory Interface (POMI)

ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems has published an article written by Trung Le, Zhao Zhang, and Zhichun Zhu, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA.

Abstract: “Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) has been extensively researched as the alternative for DRAM-based system, however traditional Memory Controller (MC) cannot efficiently track and schedule operations for all the memory devices in heterogeneous systems due to different timing requirements and complex architecture supports of various memory technologies. To address this issue, we propose a hybrid memory architecture framework called POMI (POlling-based Memory Interface). It uses a small buffer chip inserted on each DIMM to decouple operation scheduling from the controller to enable the support for diverse memory technologies in the system. Unlike the conventional DRAM-based system, POMI uses polling-based memory bus protocol for communication and to resolve any bus conflicts between memory modules. The buffer chip on each DIMM will provide feedback information to the main MC so that the polling overhead is trivial. We propose two unique designs. The first one adds additional bus lines for sending the feedback information; and the second one utilizes the Command/Address bus. The framework provides several benefits: technology-independent memory system, higher parallelism, and better scalability. Our experimental results show that POMI can efficiently support both homogeneous and heterogeneous systems. Compared with the conventional DDR4-2400 implementation, our scheme improves the performance of memory-intensive workloads by 3.7% on average. Compared with an existing interface for hybrid memory systems, Twinload, it also improves performance by 22.0% on average for memory-intensive workloads.“