Bücher von Thomas F. Wenisch

Since the 1970¿s, microprocessor-based digital platforms have been riding Moore¿s law, allowing for doubling of density for the same area roughly every two years. However, whereas microprocessor fabrication has focused on increasing instruction execution rate, memory fabrication technologies have focused primarily on an increase in capacity with negligible increase in speed. This divergent trend in performance between the processors and memory has led to a phenomenon referred to as the ¿Memory Wall.¿ To overcome the memory wall, designers have resorted to a hierarchy of cache memory levels, which rely on the principal of memory access locality to reduce the observed memory access time and the performance gap between processors and memory. Unfortunately, important workload classes exhibit adverse memory access patterns that baffle the simple policies built into modern cache hierarchies to move instructions and data across cache levels. As such, processors often spend much time idling upon a demand fetch of memory blocks that miss in higher cache levels. Prefetching¿predicting future memory accesses and issuing requests for the corresponding memory blocks in advance of explicit accesses¿is an effective approach to hide memory access latency. There have been a myriad of proposed prefetching techniques, and nearly every modern processor includes some hardware prefetching mechanisms targeting simple and regular memory access patterns. This primer offers an overview of the various classes of hardware prefetchers for instructions and data proposed in the research literature, and presents examples of techniques incorporated into modern microprocessors.

This book introduces readers to emerging persistent memory (PM) technologies that promise the performance of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) with the durability of traditional storage media, such as hard disks and solid-state drives (SSDs). Persistent memories (PMs), such as Intel's Optane DC persistent memories, are commercially available today. Unlike traditional storage devices, PMs can be accessed over a byte-addressable load-store interface with access latency that is comparable to DRAM. Unfortunately, existing hardware and software systems are ill-equipped to fully avail the potential of these byte-addressable memory technologies as they have been designed to access traditional storage media over a block-based interface. Several mechanisms have been explored in the research literature over the past decade to design hardware and software systems that provide high-performance access to PMs.Because PMs are durable, they can retain data across failures, such as power failures andprogram crashes. Upon a failure, recovery mechanisms may inspect PM data, reconstruct state and resume program execution. Correct recovery of data requires that operations to the PM are properly ordered during normal program execution. Memory persistency models define the order in which memory operations are performed at the PM. Much like memory consistency models, memory persistency models may be relaxed to improve application performance. Several proposals have emerged recently to design memory persistency models for hardware and software systems and for high-level programming languages. These proposals differ in several key aspects; they relax PM ordering constraints, introduce varying programmability burden, and introduce differing granularity of failure atomicity for PM operations.This primer provides a detailed overview of the various classes of the memory persistency models, their implementations in hardware, programming languages and software systems proposed in the recent research literature, and the PM ordering techniques employed by modern processors.