Design and Simulation of Multi-tiered Heterogeneous Memory Architecture

Heterogeneous memory systems have become increasingly popular in recent years. Because heterogeneous storage media often show significantly different characteristics in terms of bandwidth, latency, capacity, and energy consumption, it is still challenging to best utilize them for cost-efficient and energy-efficient heterogeneous memory systems. In this paper, we propose a simulation framework for multi-tiered heterogeneous memory architectures based on GEM5 and DRAMsim3 simulators. We design a heterogeneous memory controller to architect Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) as main memory, and architect both Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) and High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) as a hybrid cache of NVM. Specifically, HBM, DRAM, and NVM are managed in a single (flat) address space. However, we use an address remapping table to maintain the mappings between NVM pages and HBM/DRAM pages, and logically manage HBM/DRAM/NVM as a three-tiered hybrid memory system. We also design a hardware-supported hot page monitor based on Majority Element Algorithm (MEA) to identify the hottest pages in the DRAM, and a dynamic threshold adjustment scheme for hot page migration to balance the memory bandwidth between DRAM and HBM. Our multi-tiered heterogeneous memory architecture can take advantage of the large capacity of NVM, the low latency of DRAM, and the high bandwidth of HBM concurrently. Experimental results show that our tiered memory architecture can improve application performance by an average of $2.5\times$ compared with an NVM-only architecture, and up to 57.4% compared with a DRAM-only architecture. Moreover, the performance gap between our HBM/DRAM/NVM architecture and a HBM-only architecture is less than 10%.