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Let there be light!: the future of memory systems is photonics and 3D stacking

Published: 05 June 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Energy consumption is the fundamental barrier to exascale supercomputing and it is dominated by the cost of moving data from one point to another, not computation. Similarly, performance is dominated by data movement, not computation. The solution to this problem requires three critical technologies: 3D integration, optical chip-to-chip communication, and a new communication model. A memory system based on these technologies has the potential to lower the cost of local memory accesses by orders of magnitude and provide substantially more bandwidth. To reach the goals of exascale computing with a manageable power budget, the industry will have to adopt these technologies. Doing so will enable exascale computing, and will have a major worldwide economic impact.

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  • (2017)ApproxPIM: Exploiting realistic 3D-stacked DRAM for energy-efficient processing in-memory2017 22nd Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC)10.1109/ASPDAC.2017.7858355(396-401)Online publication date: Jan-2017
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    cover image ACM Conferences
    MSPC '11: Proceedings of the 2011 ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Memory Systems Performance and Correctness
    June 2011
    74 pages
    ISBN:9781450307949
    DOI:10.1145/1988915
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 05 June 2011

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    Author Tags

    1. DRAM
    2. memory systems
    3. photonics

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    View all
    • (2021)FPGA‐based HPC accelerators: An evaluation on performance and energy efficiencyConcurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience10.1002/cpe.657034:20Online publication date: 22-Aug-2021
    • (2020)The Performance and Energy Efficiency Potential of FPGAs in Scientific Computing2020 IEEE/ACM Performance Modeling, Benchmarking and Simulation of High Performance Computer Systems (PMBS)10.1109/PMBS51919.2020.00007(8-19)Online publication date: Nov-2020
    • (2017)ApproxPIM: Exploiting realistic 3D-stacked DRAM for energy-efficient processing in-memory2017 22nd Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC)10.1109/ASPDAC.2017.7858355(396-401)Online publication date: Jan-2017
    • (2017)Optical interconnects for extreme scale computing systemsParallel Computing10.1016/j.parco.2017.02.00164:C(65-80)Online publication date: 1-May-2017
    • (2016)Hardware–Software Integrated Silicon Photonics for Computing SystemsSilicon Photonics III10.1007/978-3-642-10503-6_5(157-189)Online publication date: 9-Jan-2016
    • (2014)Exascale design space exploration and co-designFuture Generation Computer Systems10.5555/2747903.274819730:C(46-58)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2014
    • (2012)Improving Resource Utilization in MapReduceProceedings of the 2012 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing10.1109/CLUSTER.2012.69(402-410)Online publication date: 24-Sep-2012

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