Publications related to Confluence: unified instruction supply for scale-out servers

Intermediate Address Space: virtual memory optimization of heterogeneous architectures for cache-resident workloads

David Atienza Alonso, Marina Zapater Sancho, Luis Maria Costero Valero, Darong Huang, Qunyou Liu

The increasing demand for computing power and the emergence of heterogeneous computing architectures have driven the exploration of innovative techniques to address current limitations in both the compute and memory subsystems. One such solution is the use ...

2024

Highly Parallel RTL Simulation

Verification and testing of hardware heavily relies on cycle-accurate simulation of RTL. As single-processor performance is growing only slowly, conventional, single-threaded RTL simulation is becoming impractical for increasingly complex chip designs and ...

EPFL2024

HPCache: memory-efficient OLAP through proportional caching revisited

Anastasia Ailamaki, Periklis Chrysogelos, Hamish Mcniece Hill Nicholson

Analytical engines rely on in-memory data caching to avoid storage accesses and provide timely responses by keeping the most frequently accessed data in memory. Purely frequency- and time-based caching decisions, however, are a proxy of the expected query ...

Springer2023

TiC-SAT: Tightly-coupled Systolic Accelerator for Transformers

David Atienza Alonso, Giovanni Ansaloni, Alireza Amirshahi, Joshua Alexander Harrison Klein

Transformer models have achieved impressive results in various AI scenarios, ranging from vision to natural language processing. However, their computational complexity and their vast number of parameters hinder their implementations on resource-constraine ...

2023

uKharon: A Membership Service for Microsecond Applications

Rachid Guerraoui, Javier Picorel Obando, Athanasios Xygkis, Antoine Murat

Modern data center fabrics open the possibility of microsecond distributed applications, such as data stores and message queues. A challenging aspect of their development is to ensure that, besides being fast in the common case, these applications react fa ...

USENIX Association2023

Fast correlation function calculator A high-performance pair-counting toolkit

Cheng Zhao

Context. A novel high-performance exact pair-counting toolkit called fast correlation function calculator (FCFC) is presented.Aims. With the rapid growth of modern cosmological datasets, the evaluation of correlation functions with observational and simula ...

EDP SCIENCES S A2023

Instruction-Level Power Side-Channel Leakage Evaluation of Soft-Core CPUs on Shared FPGAs

Mirjana Stojilovic, Ognjen Glamocanin, Mathias Josef Payer, Shashwat Shrivastava, Jinwei Yao, Nour Ardo

Side-channel disassembly attacks recover CPU instructions from power or electromagnetic side-channel traces measured during code execution. These attacks typically rely on physical access, proximity to the victim device, and high sampling rate measuring in ...

2023

Rebooting Virtual Memory with Midgard

Siddharth Gupta

Virtual Memory (VM) is a critical programming abstraction that is widely used in various modern computing platforms. With the rise of datacenter computing and birth of planet-scale online services, the semantic and capacity requirements from memory have ev ...

EPFL2023

Caching and Neutrality

Aikaterini Argyraki, Pavlos Nikolopoulos, Muhammad Abdullah

We are used to defining network neutrality as absence of traffic differentiation, like policing or shaping. These mechanisms, however, are often not what determines end-users’ quality of experience (QoE). Most content today is accessed through edge caches, ...

ACM Association for Computing Machinery2023

Compilation and Design Space Exploration of Dataflow Programs for Heterogeneous CPU-GPU Platforms

Aurélien François Gilbert Bloch

Today's continued increase in demand for processing power, despite the slowdown of Moore's law, has led to an increase in processor count, which has resulted in energy consumption and distribution problems. To address this, there is a growing trend toward ...

EPFL2023

HetCache: Synergising NVMe Storage and GPU acceleration for Memory-Efficient Analytics

Anastasia Ailamaki, Periklis Chrysogelos, Syed Mohammad Aunn Raza, Hamish Mcniece Hill Nicholson

Accessing input data is a critical operation in data analytics: i) slow data access significantly degrades performance, and ii) storing everything in the fastest medium, i.e., memory, incurs high operational and hardware costs. Further, while GPUs offer in ...

2023

Micro BTB: A High Performance and Storage Efficient Last-Level Branch Target Buffer for Servers

Vishal Gupta

High-performance branch target buffers (BTBs) and the L1I cache are key to high-performance front-end. Modern branch predictors are highly accurate, but with an increase in code footprint in modern-day server workloads, BTB and L1I misses are still frequen ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2022

HPCache: Memory-Efficient OLAP Through Proportional Caching

Anastasia Ailamaki, Periklis Chrysogelos, Hamish Mcniece Hill Nicholson

Analytical engines rely on in-memory caching to avoid disk accesses and provide timely responses by keeping the most frequently accessed data in memory. Purely frequency- & time-based caching decisions, however, are a proxy of the expected query execution ...

ACM2022

Request, Coalesce, Serve, and Forget: Miss-Optimized Memory Systems for Bandwidth-Bound Cache-Unfriendly Applications on FPGAs

Paolo Ienne, Mikhail Asiatici

Applications such as large-scale sparse linear algebra and graph analytics are challenging to accelerate on FPGAs due to the short irregular memory accesses, resulting in low cache hit rates. Nonblocking caches reduce the bandwidth required by misses by re ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2022

Reinforcement Learning-Based Joint Reliability and Performance Optimization for Hybrid-Cache Computing Servers

David Atienza Alonso, Ali Pahlevan, Marina Zapater Sancho, Luis Maria Costero Valero, Darong Huang

Computing servers play a key role in the development and process of emerging compute-intensive applications in recent years. However, they need to operate efficiently from an energy perspective viewpoint, while maximizing the performance and lifetime of th ...

2022

In-Memory Hardware and Architectural Extensions for Workloads Acceleration

William Andrew Simon

Utilization of edge devices has exploded in the last decade, with such use cases as wearable devices, autonomous driving, and smart homes. As their ubiquity grows, so do expectations of their capabilities. Simultaneously, their formfactor and use cases lim ...

EPFL2022

Columnar Storage Optimization and Caching for Data Lakes

Haoqiong Bian

As a unified data repository, data lake plays a vital role in enterprise data management and analysis. It composes the raw files into tables that are processed in-situ by various computation engines and applications. Therefore, the read performance of the ...

2022

Hardware and Software Support for RPC-Centric Server Architecture

Mark Johnathon Sutherland

Online services have become ubiquitous in technological society, the global demand for which has driven enterprises to construct gigantic datacenters that run their software. Such facilities have also recently become a substrate for third-party organizatio ...

EPFL2022

Beating the I/O Bottleneck: A Case for Log-Structured Virtual Disks

Vojtech Aschenbrenner

With the increasing dominance of SSDs for local storage, today's network mounted virtual disks can no longer offer competitive performance. We propose a Log-Structured Virtual Disk (LSVD) that couples log-structured approaches at both the cache and storage ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2022

Electrical-Level Attacks on CPUs, FPGAs, and GPUs: Survey and Implications in the Heterogeneous Era

Mirjana Stojilovic, Dina Gamaleldin Ahmed Shawky Mahmoud

Given the need for efficient high-performance computing, computer architectures combining CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs are nowadays prevalent. However, each of these components suffers from electrical-level security risks. Moving to heterogeneous systems, with th ...

2022