Congratulations to Minhaj Hassan on successfully defending his PhD thesis “Exploiting On-Chip Memory Concurrency in 3D Manycore Architectures”

Many congratulations Dr. Hassan!

The objective of this thesis is to optimize the uncore of 3D many-core architectures. More specifically, we note that technology trends point to large increases in memory-level concurrency. This in turn affects the design of the multi-core interconnect and organization of the memory hierarchy. The work addresses the need for re-optimization in the presence of this increase in concurrency of the memory system.

First, we observe that 2D network latency and inefficient parallelism management in the current 3D designs are the main bottlenecks to fully exploit the potentials of 3D. To that end, we propose an extremely low-latency, low-power, high-radix router and present its various versions for different network typologies and configurations. We also explore optimizations and techniques to reduce the traffic in the network. Second, we propose a reorganization of the memory hierarchy and use simple address space translations to regulate locality, bandwidth and energy trade-offs in highly concurrent 3D memory systems. Third, we analyze the rise in temperature of 3D memories and propose variable-rate per-bank refresh management that exploits variability in temperature to reduce 3D DRAM’s refresh power and extend its operating range to higher temperatures.