Our new paper: Bit-Exact ECC Recovery (BEER): Determining DRAM On-Die ECC Functions by Exploiting DRAM Data Retention Characteristics will be presented by Minesh Patel at MICRO 2020 on Monday, October 19 at 6:00 PM CEST. Join us at MICRO 2020 online!
Update: This paper won the Best Paper Award! Congratulations to Minesh Patel and co-authors: Jeremie S. Kim, Taha Shahroodi, Hasan Hassan, and Onur Mutlu,
We asked Minesh a couple questions about his paper, here’s what he had to say:
You recently won the Best Paper Award at MICRO. Can you tell us more about the
significance of this paper?
This paper addresses the larger problem that hidden proprietary features
implemented by DRAM manufacturers impede end-users from bringing out the best of
DRAM technology. We believe BEER takes an important step towards bridging the
gap between industry and end-users, starting by focusing on a key example of
such features: on-die ECC. Our work discusses how and why on-die ECC limits
third-party DRAM consumers and then introduces techniques that the consumers can
use to overcome these limitations.
What were the biggest challenges for you during the writing and review process?I would say that the biggest challenge we faced when writing this paper was to
clearly articulate the problem of on-die ECC limiting third-party users. This
includes both (i) describing how and why this limitation arises and (ii)
providing concrete examples that the reader can relate to. We spent considerable
effort in crafting these arguments such that both we and the reader have a clear
understanding of the problem we tackle, our goal in this work, and the final
value of our contributions.
Proceedings of the 53rd International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO), Virtual, October 2020.
[Slides (pptx) (pdf)]
[Short Talk Slides (pptx) (pdf)]
[Lightning Talk Slides (pptx) (pdf)]
[Talk Video (15 minutes)]
[Short Talk Video (5.5 minutes)]
[Lightning Talk Video (1.5 minutes)]
[BEER Source Code]