PARALLEL DATA LAB 

PDL Abstract

Livia: Data-Centric Computing Throughout the Memory Hierarchy

ASPLOS '20: Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, Virtual Lausanne, Switzerland, March 16-20, March 2020.

Elliot Lockerman1, Axel Feldmann2, Mohammad Bakhshalipour1, Alexandru Stanescu1, Shashwat Gupta1, Daniel Sanchez2, Nathan Beckmann1

1 Carnegie Mellon University
2 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

http://www.pdl.cmu.edu

In order to scale, future systems will need to dramatically reduce data movement. Data movement is expensive in current designs because (i) traditional memory hierarchies force computation to happen unnecessarily far away from data and (ii) processing-in-memory approaches fail to exploit locality.

We propose Memory Services, a flexible programming model that enables data-centric computing throughout the memory hierarchy. In Memory Services, applications express functionality as graphs of simple tasks, each task indicating the data it operates on. We design and evaluate Livia, a new system architecture for Memory Services that dynamically schedules tasks and data at the location in the memory hierarchy that minimizes overall data movement. Livia adds less than 3% area overhead to a tiled multicore and accelerates challenging irregular workloads by 1.3× to 2.4× while reducing dynamic energy by 1.2× to 4.7×.

FULL PAPER: pdf / talk Vvideo