The memory system is a fundamental performance and energy bottleneck in almost all computing systems. Recent system design, application, and technology trends that require more capacity, bandwidth, efficiency, and predictability out of the memory system make it an even more important system bottleneck. At the same time, DRAM and flash technologies are experiencing difficult technology scaling challenges that make the maintenance and enhancement of their capacity, energy efficiency, performance, and reliability significantly more costly with conventional techniques. In fact, recent reliability issues with DRAM, such as the RowHammer problem, are already threatening system security and predictability. We are at the challenging intersection where issues in memory reliability and performance are tightly coupled with not only system cost and energy efficiency but also system security.
Outline
In this course, we first provide a comprehensive overview of memory systems, taking an approach that covers both fundamentals and recent research. We first introduce fundamental principles and ideas, covering DRAM and emerging memory technologies as well as many architectural concepts and ideas related to memory organization, memory control, processing-in-memory, and memory latency / energy / bandwidth / reliability / security / QoS. We discuss major challenges facing modern memory systems (and the computing platforms we currently design around the memory system) in the presence of greatly increasing demand for data and its fast analysis. We examine some promising research and design directions to overcome these challenges. On the research-related part of course (sprinkled across topical lectures), we discuss the following key research topics in detail, focusing on both open problems and potential solution directions:
Course schedule:
The course will be held June 12-19, 2019.
Please register in TISS.
