Die-Stacked DRAM: Memory, Cache, or MemCache?

Abstract: Die-stacked DRAM is a promising solution for satisfying the ever-increasing memory bandwidth requirements of multi-core processors. Manufacturing technology has enabled stacking several gigabytes of DRAM modules on the active die, thereby providing orders of magnitude higher bandwidth as compared to the conventional DIMM-based DDR memories. Nevertheless, die-stacked DRAM, due to its limited capacity, cannot accommodate entire datasets of modern big-data applications. Therefore, prior proposals use it either as a sizable memory-side cache or as a part of the software-visible main memory. Cache designs can adapt themselves to the dynamic variations of applications but suffer from the tag storage/latency/bandwidth overhead. On the other hand, memory designs eliminate the need for tags, and hence, provide efficient access to data, but are unable to capture the dynamic behaviors of applications due to their static nature. In this work, we make a case for using the die-stacked DRAM partly as main memory and partly as a cache. We observe that in modern big-data applications there are many hot pages with a large number of accesses. Based on this observation, we propose to use a portion of the die-stacked DRAM as main memory to host hot pages, enabling serving a significant number of the accesses from the high-bandwidth DRAM without the overhead of tag-checking, and manage the rest of the DRAM as a cache, for capturing the dynamic behavior of applications. In this proposal, a software procedure pre-processes the application and determines hot pages, then asks the OS to map them to the memory portion of the die-stacked DRAM. The cache portion of the die-stacked DRAM is managed by hardware, caching data allocated in the off-chip memory.