Demystifying Complex Workload-DRAM Interactions

Abstract

It has become increasingly difficult to understand the complex interaction between modern applications and main memory, composed of Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) chips. Manufacturers and researchers are developing many different types of DRAM, with each DRAM type catering to different needs (e.g., high throughput, low power, high memory density). At the same time, the memory access patterns of prevalent and emerging applications are rapidly diverging, as these applications manipulate larger data sets in very different ways. As a result, the combined DRAM-workload behavior is often difficult to intuitively determine today, which can hinder memory optimizations in both hardware and software.