This webpage hosts materials (both preliminary and final) for the Memory Systems and Memory-Centric Computing course Onur Mutlu taught at the HiPEAC ACACES Summer School July 15-19, 2024.

Link to course information at the HiPEAC ACACES Summer School 2024 webpage

Computing is bottlenecked by data. Large amounts of application data overwhelm the storage capability, communication capability, and computation capability of the machines we design today. As a result, many key applications’ performance, efficiency and scalability are bottlenecked by poor data handling in modern computing systems. The memory system and the storage system are therefore key bottlenecks in modern computing systems.

This short course covers some key problems that are critical to solve in current and future computing platforms, with a special focus on the design of the memory (and storage) system. We show how the computer memory system greatly affects all key metrics we care about, including robustness (i.e., security, reliability, safety), performance, energy efficiency, predictability, and the enablement of key new applications. Memory’s importance is strongly felt today due to critical technology scaling issues at the circuit & device layers as well as greatly increasing demand for data and its fast & efficient analysis at the system & software layers.

We will start by providing an introduction to modern memory systems. We provide its fundamentals and describe major challenges facing modern memory systems in the presence of greatly increasing demand for data and its fast analysis. We then examine some promising research and design directions to overcome these challenges. We aim to discuss at least four key topics, focusing on both open problems and potential solution directions:

1. fundamental issues in memory robustness, including problems like RowHammer and RowPress, and how to enable fundamentally secure, reliable, safe architectures
2. memory-centric computing, including processing near memory (PnM) and processing using memory (PuM) systems, to enable fundamentally higher performance and energy-efficient systems
3. accelerating major data-intensive workloads, including genomics, graph analytics, machine learning, databases, via memory-centric algorithm-architecture co-design
4. machine learning assisted memory system design for better decision making, including ML-driven (e.g., reinforcement learning based) intelligent memory controllers, prefetchers, storage management systems

Prof. Onur Mutlu, omutlu@gmail.com, https://people.inf.ethz.ch/omutlu/

Onur Mutlu is a Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich. He is also a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University, where he previously held the Strecker Early Career Professorship. His current broader research interests are in computer architecture, systems, hardware security, and bioinformatics. A variety of techniques he, along with his group and collaborators, has invented over the years have influenced industry and have been employed in commercial microprocessors and memory/storage systems.

He obtained his PhD and MS in ECE from the University of Texas at Austin and BS degrees in Computer Engineering and Psychology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He started the Computer Architecture Group at Microsoft Research (2006-2009), and held various product and research positions at Intel Corporation, Advanced Micro Devices, VMware, and Google. He received the ACM SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes Award, the inaugural IEEE Computer Society Young Computer Architect Award, the inaugural Intel Early Career Faculty Award, US National Science Foundation CAREER Award, Carnegie Mellon University Ladd Research Award, faculty partnership awards from various companies, and a healthy number of best paper or “Top Pick” paper recognitions at various computer systems, architecture, and hardware security venues. He is an ACM Fellow “for contributions to computer architecture research, especially in memory systems”, IEEE Fellow for “contributions to computer architecture research and practice”, and an elected member of the Academy of Europe (Academia Europaea).

His computer architecture and digital logic design course lectures and materials are freely available on YouTube, and his research group makes a wide variety of software and hardware artifacts freely available online. For more information, please see his webpage at https://people.inf.ethz.ch/omutlu/.