Drs. Manish Parashar, Ivan Rodero and Dario Pompili received a 3-year $300,000 grant from NSF for the project "An Experimental Platform for Investigating Energy-Performance Tradeoffs for Systems with Deep Memory
Hierarchies". The project abstract is give below.
An Experimental Platform for Investigating Energy-Performance Tradeoffs for Systems with Deep Memory Hierarchies
Abstract: As the scale and complexity of computing and data infrastructures supporting science and engineering grow, power costs are becoming an important concern, in terms of their costs, reliability and overall sustainability. As a result, it is becoming increasingly important to understand power/performance behaviors and tradeoffs from an application perspective for emerging system configuration, i.e., those with multiple cores, deep memory hierarchies and accelerators. The goal of this project is to develop an instrumented experimental platform that can enable such an understanding and can fundamentally enable research and training activities in this area. Specifically, the proposed experimental platform is composed of nodes with a deep memory architecture that contains four different levels: DRAM, PCIe-based non-volatile memory, solid-state drive and spinning hard disk, in addition to accelerators. Power metering is deployed as part of the infrastructure. The experimental platform enables the experimental exploration of the power/performance behaviors of large scale computing systems and datacenters as well as compute and data intensive application they support, and uniquely supports research toward understanding the management and optimization of these systems and applications. It also enables research in multiple areas, including: application-aware cross-layer management, power-performance tradeoffs for data-intensive scientific workflows and thermal implications of deep memory hierarchies in virtualized Cloud environments.