Join us for our upcoming SAFARI Live Seminar
Date: Monday, December 12 at 4:00 pm Zurich time (CET)
Speaker: Ataberk Olgun, SAFARI Research Group, ETH Zurich
Where: ETZ E81 & Livestream on YouTube Link
Title: MetaSys: Cross-Layer Optimization with a Practical Open-source Metadata Management System
Abstract
Hardware-software cooperative techniques are powerful approaches to improving the performance, quality of service, and security of general-purpose processors. They are, however, typically challenging to rapidly implement and evaluate in real hardware as they require full-stack changes to the hardware, system software, and instruction-set architecture.
MetaSys implements a rich hardware-software interface and lightweight metadata support that can be used as a common basis to rapidly implement and evaluate new cross-layer techniques. We demonstrate MetaSys’s versatility and ease-of-use by implementing and evaluating three cross-layer techniques for: (i) prefetching in graph analytics; (ii) bounds checking in memory unsafe languages, and (iii) return address protection in stack frames; each technique requires only ~100 lines of Chisel code over MetaSys.
Using MetaSys, we perform the first detailed experimental study to quantify the performance overheads of using a single metadata management system to enable multiple cross-layer optimizations in CPUs. We identify the key sources of bottlenecks and system inefficiency of a general metadata management system. We design MetaSys to minimize these inefficiencies and provide increased versatility compared to previously proposed metadata systems. Using three use cases and a detailed characterization, we demonstrate that a common metadata management system can be used to efficiently support diverse cross-layer techniques in CPUs. MetaSys is completely and freely available at https://github.com/CMU-SAFARI/MetaSys.
Speaker Bio: Ataberk is a PhD student in the SAFARI Research Group, led by Onur Mutlu, at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. He received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Computer Engineering from TOBB University of Economics and Technology in Turkey. His research interests include memory systems, DRAM, processing-in-memory, and hardware security.
Related Paper:
Nandita Vijaykumar, Ataberk Olgun, Konstantinos Kanellopoulos, Nisa Bostanci, Hasan Hassan, Mehrshad Lotfi, Phillip B Gibbons, Onur Mutlu, “MetaSys: A Practical Open-Source Metadata Management System to Implement and Evaluate Cross-Layer Optimizations“, Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization (TACO), 2022.
[Github Link]