BU Computer Systems Seminar

Speaker: Denis Hoornaert, Ph.D. Candidate, Technical University of Munich

Talk Title: “On-the-fly Reorganization of High-Order Data Objects to Achieve Effortless Locality”

Abstract: The shift to data-intensive processing from the cloud to the edge has brought new challenges and expectations for the next generation of intelligent computing systems.

However, a substantial performance gap still exists between the performance of processing elements and sustainable main memory throughput.

Modern System-on-Chips heavily rely on multi-level caching architectures to bridge this gap.

The performance boost provided is often an enabler for adopting data-heavy computation, including machine learning and vision workloads, for live decision-making.

These caches are most effective for data access patterns that exhibit ideal spatiotemporal locality.

However, few data-intensive applications are characterized by ideal locality. Instead, when naively implemented, most applications exhibit poor locality and must undergo costly redesigns and tuning to benefit from caching effects.

The proposed research tackles the question: Can we leverage application-level knowledge of data access patterns in the underlying memory hierarchy to export ideal data locality?

In other words, we set our focus on a key limitation of modern computing systems, i.e., that the representation of data in microarchitectural caches mirrors the organization of data in main memory.

Our work proposes to investigate the ability to reorganize and reshape the content of data blocks as they are transferred from their representation in main memory to processor-facing caches.

Bio: Denis Hoornaert (M.Sc) is a Ph.D. student at the Technical University of Munich (TUM, Germany) and a research associate at the Chair of Cyber-physical Systems in Production Engineering (Prof. Marco Caccamo). Previously, he graduated in Computer Science from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium) in 2019 and collaborated with Hipperos, a Belgian start-up designing real-time operating systems. His current research focuses on the predictability of safety-critical real-time systems.

In particular, he investigates how hardware/software co-design can help tame memory-originated interference in multi-core System-on-Chips.