A read-write aware replacement policy for phase change memory

  • Authors:

  • Xi Zhang;Qian Hu;Dongsheng Wang;Chongmin Li;Haixia Wang

  • Affiliations:

  • Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology, Department of Computer Science & Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China;Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology, Department of Computer Science & Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China;Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology, Department of Computer Science & Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China;Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology, Department of Computer Science & Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China;Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology, Department of Computer Science & Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

  • Venue:
  • APPT'11 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Advanced parallel processing technologies
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Scaling DRAM will be increasingly difficult due to power and cost constraint. Phase Change Memory (PCM) is an emerging memory technology that can increase main memory capacity in a cost-effective and power-efficient manner. However, PCM incurs relatively long latency , high write energy, and finite endurance. To make PCM an alternative for scalable main memory, write traffic to PCM should be reduced, where memory replacement policy could play a vital role. In this paper, we propose a Read-Write Aware policy (RWA) to reduce write traffic without performance degradation. RWA explores the asymmetry of read and write costs of PCM, and prevents dirty data lines from frequent evictions. Simulations results on an 8-core CMP show that for memory organization with and without DRAM buffer, RWA can achieve 33.1% and 14.2% reduction in write traffic to PCM respectively. In addition, an Improved RWA (I-RWA) is proposed that takes into consideration the write access pattern and can further improve memory efficiency. For organization with DRAM buffer, I-RWA provides a significant 42.8% reduction in write traffic. Furthermore, both RWA and I-RWA incurs no hardware overhead and can be easily integrated into existing hardware.